When I first heard from Lyndall Phelps, artist-in-residence at London's Natural History Museum, that thousands of specimens had been evacuated' to country houses in Oxfordshire - and had lived happily for the duration alongside their rather grand foster-parents, some startling images came to mind.

Lyndall's exhibition at the museum's Tring branch sets out to reveal this story through photographs examining the relationship between the specimens, their temporary homes and the work of the museum, making wonderful use of the obvious surreal element to ensure that visitors leave with smiles on their faces.

An Arctic hare grazing on a billiard table is a case in point - billiard rooms and racquet courts, says Lyndall, were a popular choice for specimen storage because such games were felt to be frivolous in wartime.

Some houses received 20 lorry-loads of artefacts. The operation saved for future study an enormous amount of scientific material that would otherwise have been destroyed when the museum.

Lyndall, a visual arts teacher and artist from Australia, now living in Ely, has always been interested in museums and the human impulse to collect and categorise nature.

Thanks to funding from the Arts Council and the Leverhulme Trust, she was able to look for a project which would allow deeper investigation of these themes.

Her inspiration came on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Darwin Centre, where part of the Natural History Museum's spirit collection (bits in bottles) is kept.

"The guide mentioned that the collection was evacuated to a stately home in the war," she said. "So then I researched the museum archives and found the records for 25 country houses where specimens from the entomology, ornithology and zoology departments had been stored."

Five of these were in Oxfordshire, including Huntercombe Place in the village of Nuffield, now a care home for the elderly, and Broughton Castle, near Banbury.

"When I spoke to the present occupants of each of the houses, the only one who had any memory of the evacuated objects was Lord Saye and Sele at Broughton," said Lyndall.

"He told me the boxes they were packed in took up the entire hall, and he had imagined in fits of playfulness that there were lions and tigers inside. From the lists I found I knew that there actually had been - so his long-held fantasy was true!"

A relationship of this kind between owners and objects was one of the factors that determined Lyndall's choice of specimens from the list for each house to be photographed.

"I also wanted to focus on things that are endangered - or, on the other hand, really common - and I have chosen a few that relate to me, such as the koala, which also links to the colonial history of some of these homes."

The exhibition comprises 750 specimens in two series of digital photographs - which themselves contain photographic prints - displayed on a plasma screen. All of them were taken by museum photographers or a freelance, Richard Davies, with Lyndall acting as director of the shots.

In some, photo portraits of the objects appear in a room in their wartime home. Others show the actual specimen with a photograph of the room that housed it, placed somewhere in one of the stores at the Tring or London museums, to give some visual information about the work carried out in their non-public areas.

A Broughton Castle tiger-skin, for example, lies in a specimen study room. Conserved by the best preparers of skins in India, it has a black velvet trimming, scalloped to make it decorative and nicely suggestive of the iron hand in the velvet glove' nature of big cats.

The evacuated specimens were not, by and large, the sort of fully stuffed creatures visitors can enjoy in the main display at Tring.

"Scientifically," said Lyndall, "these weren't important. It was the skins and the skulls and the insects that mattered. Skins are preserved in three ways - flat, like the tiger rug; round, where they are partially stuffed; and on cards, for small things. I used mostly round skins because they give a bit more form to the body - and some of the flat skins are quite flat, so it is difficult to distinguish the features.

"I was very keen for the original labels to be part of the work because they tell the story of the specimen. Some of the information on them is wonderful - for example, the osprey, from Sizewell Beach in Suffolk, had a label that said Caught while fishing. Had to swim in afterwards to get him.' Some of the wallabies are recorded as having arrived on the first ship to use refrigeration, in the late 1800s - a journey of several months."

While such detail is an interesting part of the project and will be included in a hand-written book displayed alongside the screen, Lyndall wanted to avoid images which gave only a straight historical interpretation of the evacuation.

"I didn't want a historical recreation of houses in the war, or people tidying them up. I wanted to photograph them as they are now - the sitting room at Huntercombe with its walking frames and wheelchair for example - to show the changes over 60 years," she said.

Lyndall hopes the exhibition will invite curiosity about the dangers faced by natural species, past and present, and make little-known aspects of the museum world more visible. "But I also want people to enjoy the show and see it as fun," she said. "There is enough seriousness in the world!"

Natural History Museum at Tring, Akeman Street, Tring, call 0207 942 6171. Evacuate: December.14-February 3. Admission free. Meet the Artist' 7-8pm, December 13, tickets (advance booking only) £2 (not suitable for children)