This is so, so cool! I love these pictures. I lived in a college town with a huge natural history special collections in the university library and did an artist residency where I researched their woodpecker images for the artists’ book I printed. I love how they used to pose the birds in such weird ways as to show off their markings - and the “gang’s all here” illustrations in which they are all in the same image. Thanks so much for these.
And idk if you live near a university, but I know ours let the public come into a reading room and they could handle and photograph (but not check out obviously) all the natural history books from the 1800s and on. Just mentioning in case you ever feel like taking your excellent image digging skills to old physical books!