Next week the Horniman Walrus will be making his way to Margate to feature in the Hayward Touring exhibition Curiosity: Art & The Pleasures of Knowing at Turner Contemporary.

Our famously over-stuffed walrus, weighing in at just under one ton, has been in our Natural History Gallery since 1901. Since then, he hasn’t moved more than 25 feet, so getting him out and on his way to the coast is a huge task for museum staff to organise.

Our conservation department has been working with specialist art handlers to ensure the move goes as smoothly as possible. Preparations are under way: the Walrus has already received his annual clean, and the larger pieces of his iceberg are being moved away.

The biggest challenge is the need to lift the Walrus out of the gallery over the other cases. The Natural History Gallery will be closed to the public next week while this is happening, but we've put together some simple sketches to help you picture what will happen.

The Walrus will be lifted on Monday 13 and will leave the Museum on Wednesday 15 May. The Natural History Gallery will be closed throughout, so this week is your last chance to wave goodbye and wish him well on his holiday. He'll return to the Museum in September.

Be sure to follow the Walrus' journey on Twitter, and keep an eye on our blog, as we'll be live-blogging throughout. You can even catch up with the Walrus' own comments @HornimanWalrus.

On Tuesday 23 April we were delighted to host a lecture by Helen Saberi, author of numerous books and articles on the history of food and drink.

Following on from research she undertook for her most recent publication Tea: A global history, Helen took us through the story of tea trade along the Silk Road. She illustrated her history with some remarkable examples of tea preparation from across Asia, including a Tibetan recipe whereby black tea is mixed with yak butter and the dregs of the cup mopped up with roasted barley flour.

Another example was qymaq chai, an Afghan wedding tea which mixes green tea with baking soda to turn it pink before milk, sugar and cardamom are added. Finally, the cup is topped off with a ‘float’ of clotted cream.

After the talk we held a tea tasting and, as it was a beautiful evening, we opted to set it outside on the terrace of our new Gardens Pavilion. Since it seemed strange to drink artisanal teas from  impersonal cups we invited guests to bring their own. There was a great selection, with examples ranging from a Czech produced chai cup purchased in Uzbekistan, to a hand-painted mug commemorating sheep and Scotland!

Don’t forget to book for our next Horniman Talk as part of our Food, Drink and Feasting series, when Dr. Any Mills will be exploring Western Polynesian Food and Drink: Acts of Power on Tuesday 21 May.

You can book for this free event, and the other talks in our series, online through EventBrite.

The next Bioblitz is almost upon us. Next week, Kathie May and Jon Ablett are reviewing our mollusc collections.

Kathie is the Senior Curator (Mollusca) at the Natural History Museum and is responsible for the curation, conservation and interpretation of the Mollusca, Bryozoa and Comparative Anatomy collections (around 9.5 million specimens!). Kathie has particular expertise in the identification and interpretation of historical mollusc material and good knowledge of handwriting/curation methods of early collectors.

Jon is the Curator of non-marine Mollusca & Cephalopoda at the Natural History Museum and is responsible for their curation and upkeep, as well as answering questions, providing loans and identifying and accessioning new material. As curator in charge of cephalopods it was his responsibility to design and manage the preservation, storage and display of museum's the giant squid (Architeuthis dux), acquired in 2004.

Remember to follow us on Twitter @HornimanReviews to see how it goes.

We're very excited to be a finalist for the Art Fund Prize for the Museum of the Year. On Friday last, we were delighted to welcome the judges for their visit to the Horniman.

Starting at the clocktower, we brought them on a tour along the front of the building which neatly shows our history - from Frederick Horniman's original gift to our unique learning spaces.

The tour continued into the gardens, exploring our materials, food, dye and medicine gardens, highlighting how we're making connections between the plants growing there and objects in our collections.

The judges then had some time to explore our galleries and aquarium and meet some of our staff.

Later, we explained what made 2012 such a special year at the Horniman: re-launching our gardens, the Body Adorned exhibition, the Big Dance Picnic, our Christmas Fayre, our project with Abbey Manor College - the list goes on!

To close the visit, we showed the judges this video made with our fantastic visitors who tell us why we're their museum of the year.

The winner of the Art Fund Prize for Museum of the Year is announced on 4 June.

Last week, the artists behind the Rain Room paid a visit to the Horniman to prepare for their newest work.

Thanks to the support of our fantastic visitors in the Museums at Night vote, rAndom International will be contributing a new installation to our event, The Horniman Garden Party.

In preparation, the group have toured the Horniman to get a real feel for the place and explore the spaces available.

The Horniman Garden Party will be held on 16 May 2013, as part of Museums at Night. To enjoy rAndom International's installation, live music, poetry, alternative museum tours and much more, book your tickets online.

This week marks the start of our Entomology Bioblitz where we will be reviewing our insects collections, following on from our previous Bioblitz reviews of birds, reptiles and mammals.

Our insect collections contain around 100,000 specimens collected from around the world. Our expert carrying out the review is Howard Mendel. Howard has spent his career working with natural history collections across several museums, including several years as Head of Entomology Collections at the Natural History Museum.

He has a wide interest in insects and a particular interest in beetles. Howard is involved with many organisations and has been heavily involved in biological recording. In addition to Howard’s many scientific publications, he founded and wrote for the Suffolk Natural History Series.

After leaving the NHM, Howard has continued to work freelance on projects which interest him and we are very happy that the Natural History Bioblitz Collections Review at the Horniman is one of those projects.

If you've been following our Tumblr blog, you'll have already seen plenty of fascinating finds the Collections People Stories team have been making in the stores. Sarah, who is working on the project, has offered us an update on how it's going.

At the beginning of the project, we spent a number of long months at the computer looking at the museum’s registers, which detailed objects coming in to the museum from 1897 to 1996. We compared the information in the registers with the object information in our database and created new records for anything that didn’t already exist.

More recently, we've been working in the stores: we take out each object, enter and check the information about it on our database, take a good photograph and pack it away again neatly and safely. 

We check objects for any numbers, input information about what the objects are, what they are made of, where they’re from and any information about the people who donated the objects to the museum.

We then measure each object, check for any inscriptions and check that there is a good description on our database. We then briefly check the object’s condition, take a photograph (having had amazing training from our lovely photographer, Dani), and repack it in its box.

This process will help us to know what we have in the stores, highlight important objects for potential re-display in the future, and improve the objects’ documentation so we will be able to find things more easily.

We’re made up of four people in two full-time teams called Haddon and Quick, named after two former curators at the Horniman. There is also part time sub team called Haddock, a cunning blend of the two.

Team Haddon started by reviewing charms and Quick have started on spoons. We have already come across some amazing and fascinating objects! A highlight for team Haddon was a Lappett-Faced vulture skull wrapped in leather on a cord used as a charm from Nigeria.

Don’t be deceived by the seemingly repetitive appearance of team Quick’s current reviewing topic; there have been spoon highlights too! One of these was a pair of scorpion handled spoons. Sadly, at the moment, there is not much known about them on the database so hopefully we’ll find out more soon!

We put up any interesting and aesthetically pleasing finds on the museum’s Tumblr blog (including the aforementioned objects), so do check it out.

After the reptiles had been reviewed on the Monday and Tuesday, it was the mammals’ turn for the rest of the week.

During our latest Bioblitz, our expert, Pat Morris, spent three days looking at all of our mammal specimens. He checked their significance and identified any Star Specimens we have.

Pat started in the busy gallery, which was full of excited children also looking at the animals on display. He looked at every mammal specimen on his way round, discussing his thoughts with us: inaccurate identifications, rare species and unusual preparations.

Back at the stores, Pat looked through our taxidermy mounts and cases. He enjoyed seeing some of our interesting specimens, such as our pied hare or our leopard with an atypical coat pattern.

We have a large collection of mammal skeletal material. This includes a series of “double preparations”: half taxidermy mount and half skeleton. They are a fascinating educational tool and reveal how the skeleton sits inside the skin. Some of them even have organs in them!

Finally, Pat visited the spirit store to look at all of our mammal material preserved in fluid. Although there weren’t any Star Specimens among them, Pat was able to point out the strengths and weaknesses of the collection.

Now we have a few weeks to prepare for the next Bioblitz Review: entomology!

Last week we conducted our second Bioblitz Review. With the first one (birds) behind us, it was time to focus on the next group: reptiles.

Colin McCarthy came in for two days to take a look at our reptile and amphibian collections. We knew that, unlike the birds, many of our reptiles weren’t identified correctly and were keen to remedy that. Colin looked at each specimen, identified them as far as he could and assessed their significance. There weren’t any highly significant specimens amongst the reptiles or amphibians but the opportunity to improve the collection information as well as hone our own ID skills was invaluable.

Colin talked us through the differences between crocodiles, alligators and caimans using our specimens. As a result, we now know that we have a few of each.

We unfurled many a snake skin to identify the species based on its pattern and size, as well as counting the scales across it. This allowed us to correct previously misidentified specimens.

Colin looked through our tortoises and together we managed to identify most them by looking at the shapes and patterns of the scales on their shells.

For more photos of the reptile Bioblitz, check out our Flickr.

It doesn't seem long since we were Bioblitzing birds, but this week the collections review team have been busy preparing for our next Natural History experts.

On Monday, Colin McCarthy joins us to review our collections of Reptile and Amphibian specimens.

The history of taxidermy has been a lifelong hobby interest for him, and he has published papers and several books on the subject. He has travelled widely in search of interesting taxidermy specimens and stories, and his house is home to one of the largest collections of historical taxidermy in Britain.

We're looking forward to working with these experts and hopefully finding a star specimen or two amongst our collections!