If you move cabinets with drawers full of specimens, strap the cabinets once around the middle! The black plastic strapping with little metal buckles work fine. Keep a knife in your front pocket and pliers in your back pocket, at all times, to cut and tighten the straps; they will be handy many other times during your move. Instead of gripping the strap with plier jaws, wrap the end around a plier handle and pull. This strapping will prevent cabinet sides from bowing out and dropping drawers. It will also prevent accidents like tilt in doors from falling off and hinged doors from swinging open. For an example see Strap Pack Kit.
Although this milestone didn't complete the move, in August 1992, about seven months after we started,
we slid the last cabinet onto the loading dock in Camarillo. I notice this cabinet was double-strapped,
must have been a case full of types! ................. (just kidding)
Standing left to right- Sam, Walter Wehtje, Andre Joiner, Lloyd Kiff. Sitting- Manuel Marin A.
Dollys in right foreground.
The Big One: We moved over six hundred (?) cabinets
of skins, nests, and eggs about 50 miles. They were stacked in two
layers and re-stacked (in some instances) two high. We used
the same cabinets, so we didn't have to transfer skins from old cabinets
to new ones. Double-stacked, empty cabinets can be taken down easily
by two guys without a lift. Same for installation. Over the
years, I have done both tasks myself many times without a lift, and I am
not that strong. Taking down a double-stacked top layer cabinet full
of skins, moving and reinstalling can be done easily by two guys and a
small fork-lift. These lifts are inexpensive to rent from any truck
rental yard. The forks just fit a standard Berkeley type cabinet.
There are a couple of types of lifts, if it doesn't look like it is perfect
for the job, it probably isn't. We used both a hand-cranking, and a foot-pedal
hydraulic lift. Before moving a full cabinet, practice using the lift a
few times on an empty one. Strap a full, end-of-row cabinet, raise
the fork to almost the bottom if it, pull it out, slide it on, let
it down slowly, and roll it away. Piece-o-cake! If needed, you can
also pull out a cabinet from the middle of an upper row. We used the lifts
like this on skin, and nest cabinets, but not for eggs. When moving any
cabinet, especially heavy full ones, refrain from applying torque. Push
or pull on two corners, not just one, so you don't twist it out of square.
Small hydraulic
lift. Probably about 5ft. tall.
A hand-cranker looks the same, except has a crank, cable, and ratchet
mechanism.
Dollys will be handy. We made and used dollys to shuffle cabinets many years before the big move. Four heavy-duty, swivel casters are attached with carriage bolts to the very corners of 3/4" thick, bottom-of-cabinet sized plywood.
No scientific specimen is replaceable, do the move yourself. You need two guys, a few 2x4s, and the lifts if you decide to move full cabinets. If you have a lot of cabinets, you will want to assemble a small dedicated team that will learn together as they go.
If I recall correctly, the largest (20ft'?) "U-Haul holds a single layer of twelve Berkeley type cabinets. We usually had plenty of other stuff to go on top of that layer, so we didn't double stack cabinets in the truck, but I think the truck is tall enough to do it. Make sure the truck has an electric lift.
Skins rolling in the drawers is a potential problem. If your skins are in relatively deep trays, and can't roll to jamb against the drawer above it, no problem. If rolling might be a problem, consider covering with large sheets of paper and stapling them down if necessary. (I did this once with cabinets of eggs from Patuxent. They were in Lane cabinets and drawers so I taped the paper down, instead of stapling. Thankfully a number of volunteers showed up. So, keeping them level, we hand carried the cabinets full of eggs down I forget how many staircases without mishap.) Hopefully a paper covering will slide against the bottom of the next higher drawer, so if a skin does get jammed you can open the drawer without breaking feathers. In my experience a layer of cotton covering a drawer can start to roll up when you pull it out. When this occurs, eggs start breaking before you know what happened ... might squash skins as well. All this sound too risky? Have Berkeley type wood drawers? Take them out of the cabinets and stack them up. Small birds in drawers can be stacked, one on top of the other, covered with an empty drawer, strapped near each end, and moved. Cover individual drawers of large birds with an upside-down empty drawer, stack, strap and move as above. I have transported in a small pick-up truck, stacked-and-strapped drawers of skins, loose eggs in trays and boxed eggs many hundreds of times this way ... never had a problem.
Test these or other methods you may want to try on a load of teaching skins.
I have moved or helped move dozens of small, medium, and big egg collections, cross country and internationally. It is likely you will never have to face the prospect of moving a big egg collection, but if you do, give me a jingle, it is an entirely different story.
Good luck!
-Sam
P.S. You'll be moving other stuff too. Our last, The Big One, entailed moving a large library, library shelving, furniture, file cabinets etc for a half dozen offices. So, we bought hundreds of new corrugated cartons (RSC) in a couple of different sizes Uniform size, new cartons stack very nicely, assorted sizes of battered ones won't. Use heavy duty carton sealing tape on the boxes, especially if, like us, you end up reusing them for several trips.
P.P.S. If you have to move anything small and very delicate, like formations of hairlike crystals, use loosely wadded dry cleaner bags (the very thin poly stuff) for packing material. And, don't ship albatross eggs, personally transport them instead. Almost all well packed eggs will survive if a package is dropped, but albatross eggs will break, everytime.
-s-
.... Apologies for the too liberal use of parentheses.
Pesticide application would be about the only way to do an overall fumigation. I personally would not do it unless nearly all of the cabinets were infested, but that shouldn't ever happen. The days of panicking and nuking the whole place at the sight of three infested cabinets are in the past, I think.
We didn't fumigate before the "Big Move." We did pick up beetles in several cabinets while in transit. That happens occasionally, moving or not. I would simply monitor for pests very thoroughly after the move.
When a cabinet got bugs, here's what I did:
Heat seal the skins in poly bags and freeze at -15F for 7-10 days for small skins, maybe two weeks for large skins. Lower temps are recommended I think, but real world, off the shelf freezer won’t get that cold. Minus10-15F worked for me.
Put PDB in the cabinets. I know the stuff is restricted where the public has access. Here's, how at least in my mind, I got around that. I bought a "50 gallon" drum of PDB (Van Waters Rogers). I kept handy a bunch of 4 oz glass jars, with metals lids, and filled up with PDB. When the skins were put in a freezer, I vacuumed the cabinet and drawers, then I opened a dozen PDB jars and spread them out on the drawers in the cabinet. I put a sign on the cabinet, “Sealed for fumigation, DO NOT OPEN"
Later put the skins back in the cabinet. Leave them in the bags. Replace the lids on the PDB jars, but leave in place just in case they are needed, again.
Monitor the cabinet extra closely, for a month or so. I simply left very large skins in the bags until someone needed them opened.
I always kept asking for, but never got, a -15F or colder freezer that was large enough to accommodate a cabinet; then everything, including skins in the drawers could simply be frozen in one no hassle shot.
....
When the guys came back from expedition with a thousand recently collected specimens, I isolated them (the skins) in storage cabinets way from the main collection. Then I cycled them through the drying cabinet for a week or so each batch. Then I individually bagged and froze every last one. I let them thaw out still bagged, and watched for a while before handing over to Lloyd to integrate into the collection.
Try to keep the coldest, largest, stand up freezer reserved for debugging only. If you get outbreaks in five or six cabinets (more than the freezer can handle in one load. This never happened to us.) , open and put a whole bunch of PDB jars in the cabinet that is waiting for freezer space. I haven't needed to do it, and haven't tried it, but I imagine you could put the skins in bags with PDB and seal. This will allow the PDB vapor concentration to rise quite high. It won't kill beetles but it will slow them down to nearly motionless. Note: Keep PDB away from polystyrene, the rigid stuff. PDB doesn't seem to affect acrylic (plexiglas) or polyethylene.
-s-