The museum's bird collection (more than 173,000 specimens) is the fourth-largest university-based collection in the world (behind Harvard, Berkeley, and Michigan). The museum's holdings of birds from Peru, Bolivia, the West Indies, and the Southeastern United States are the largest in the world, and the collection is among the five largest in the world from Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and Argentina. The collection contains 143,000 skins, 21,000 complete skeletons, 8,000 fluid-preserved specimens, 15,000 stomach-content samples, and thousands of tape recordings of bird vocalizations.

Since 1978, 254 research publications (including 24 books) have been based wholly, or in part, on bird specimens in the LSU Museum of Natural Science. Graduates of the LSU ornithology program have been presidents of leading North American scholarly societies. Recent graduates of the LSU graduate program in ornithology are currently the curators of some of the largest and most important bird collections in the world: the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, and the Bell Museum of Natural History at the University of Minnesota. LSU ornithologists are the world's experts on birds from several Latin American regions, including Peru and Bolivia, which together contain more species of birds than any other similar-sized region in the world. LSU is the only university in the world that has conducted field research in South America every year since 1962.