Beaded Metis Buffalo Hunter's Saddle

Mr. Rick Cuthbertson recently donated to The Manitoba Museum a beaded Métis pad saddle.  His maternal grandfather, Constable Joseph Alexander Blackburn, bought the saddle when he was in what is now Saskatchewan at the time of the Riel Rebellion.  He was stationed at Maple Creek and Medicine Hat from May of 1885 to April 1890 and was among the officers who formed the guard for the Riel trial.

Photo courtesy of Rick Cuthbertson family. Used with permission. 

The saddle is typical of those used by members of the Métis buffalo brigades and illustrated in the paintings of Paul Kane.  The beading is the work of an expert artist.  The beads are small and sewn with very fine sinew rather than linen or cotton thread and although it impossible to say for sure, it was probably made in the early 1800s.

Afghanistan Memorial Fragment

A plaque featuring a fragment of the marble base of the Memorial of the Fallen in Afghanistan was presented to The Manitoba Museum in April by the Commanding Officer of the Winnipeg Infantry Tactical Grouping (Royal Winnipeg Rifles and Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders). It will be on display in the museum’s foyer from November 9 to November 30.

Memorial Plaque. Photograph by Hans Thater.

The original memorial was erected at Kandahar Airfield, Afghanistan in 2006 and grew in symbolic importance over time as it evolved with the pace of operations. At the end of the Canadian combat operations, in June 2011, it contained plaques honouring all of the fallen in the Afghan theatre of Operations, including:

Canadian soldiers;

Allied soldiers serving under Canadian Command;

Members of the Canadian Government; and

One member of the Canadian Press Corps.

It was a living memorial that changed and expanded, and when families of the fallen started to visit Kandahar Airfield in 2009 for Remembrance Day, this cenotaph was a focal point of the ceremonies.

Memorial of the Fallen, Kandahar Airfield

The Memorial of the Fallen has attained national significance, and in early December, 2011, it was repatriated to Canada. It is scheduled to be unveiled in its new permanent home in Ottawa in 2014.

Lieutenant Colonel B.W. Takeuchi wrote in a letter to the museum, “This simple piece [of the cenotaph] represents the essence of Canada’s effort and sacrifice in maintaining world peace and helping the citizens of Afghanistan.”

Marvellous Molluscs

(photo by Hans Thater)

Gastropods (snails and their relatives) are the most diverse molluscs, so it seemed appropriate that the gastropod case should hold the greatest variety of specimens!

This has been a year rich in exhibit work, and we are finishing off with a bit of a bang. About a week ago we finished installation of our latest Discovery Room exhibit, a collaboration between Zoology and Paleontology entitled The World is Their Oyster: Marvellous Molluscs. As with the other D-Room exhibits we have produced (such as Jaws and Teeth and Colours in Nature), this was a collaborative effort. It was a pleasure to again work with Randy Mooi on selecting suitable specimens and preparing copy, and to collaborate with our superb collections and exhibit staff to produce the finished exhibit.

The idea for this exhibit was quite straightforward: to select suitable specimens from our permanent collection, which would depict the wonderful diversity and variability of molluscs. We also wished to give visitors a bit of information about the long fossil record of molluscs, their evolution, and a few “case studies” of particular molluscs or features.


This seemed like a simple sort of thing to do, but of course the view on the ground is never the same as that from 30,000 feet. Most of our issues were associated with the sheer number of mollusc specimens housed in our collections. We knew that there would be many excellent examples to choose from, but we did not appreciate quite how difficult this would be. There were so many to consider that, whenever we chose one beautiful snail for the gastropod case, it seemed there were at least 10 other good ones that could not be included.

The other issue was that molluscs are just so darned interesting, weird, and complicated in their life stories, dietary habits, and evolution. We kept discovering unusual things that we had not been aware of (or at least, I did; I suspect that Randy already knew some of these things). As a result, more and more new ideas came forward, and it was very hard to decide what we could include in the modest panel copy that accompanies the specimens. We were grateful that Stephanie Whitehouse, the designer, was so clear in telling us exactly how much space we had!

As issues and problems go, these were obviously good ones to have. And as these photos show, we were able to share a great variety of beautiful and appealing mollusc material. You will just have to imagine what the cases might have looked like if we had been able to include every single specimen we considered worthy of exhibit!

The cephalopod case

A variety of abalones

The Mineral Exhibit 2: Installation

With the front glass ready to install, Bert Valentin does some final work inside the big case.

The past week we have been very busy installing our temporary exhibit on molluscs (The World is Their Oyster: Marvellous Molluscs), which will open in a few days. While thinking about this exhibit process, I remembered that there are some splendid photos of the installation of our mineral exhibit, courtesy of our designer, Stephanie Whitehouse. So as a follow-up to the post about that exhibit a few months back, here are a few images of the complicated process of assembling specimens and cases!

Janis Klapecki aligns one of the pyrite specimens from the Snow Lake area.

The amethyst, with a weight of about one-half tonne, was somewhat problematic to install! Using the loading dock hoist, it had been placed on a purpose-built steel platform. Now, Marc Hebert and Bob Peacock make sure it stays straight, while Bert Valentin cranks the modified engine hoist that will lift it to case level. The rest of us serve as ballast on the hoist.

The raised amethyst is gently lowered into place in the case. VERY gently.

I vacuum the amethyst before the case is moved into place. Hans Thater holds a light so that every bit of lint can be seen.

Marc and Bert connect the lighting power, while Bob waits to roll the amethyst case into final position.

Botanist Blown Away

This September I was thrilled to be able to go on a tour of southern Manitoba with my colleagues here at the Museum. Our mission: to learn more about the people, places and wildlife that calls this part of the province home to generate ideas for new gallery exhibits.

Fruiting Dotted Blazingstar in the prairie near Miniota.

Hawk's-beard in fruit.

One of the most memorable things about our trip was neither a person, nor a place, nor an organism. In fact, it wasn’t even an animate object-it was a force: the wind. For anyone who has spent time on the treeless prairies you know what I mean when I say that the wind has an almost tangible physical presence. Standing on the Assiniboine River valley slope on a lovely patch of mixed grass prairie near Minota, I almost felt that I would get blown away along with the Dotted Blazingstar and Hairy Golden Aster seeds. On a windy day such as that, it was easy to understand why so many prairie plants evolved wind-dispersed seeds. Plants in the Aster family are particularly adept at becoming windborne due to the extreme modification of their sepals.

Cocklebur has animal-dispersed fruits.

In most plants, the sepals are tiny leaves that simply dry up as the fruit develops. But plants in the Aster family have sepals that are highly modified into special structures called pappi. In some species, like beggarticks, the pappus consists of spines that help the fruits catch onto the fur of passing animals; cocklebur fruits have hooked prickles to achieve the same goal. In most of the prairie Asters however, the pappus is a ring or puff of feathery hairs that act like a parachute. Under very windy conditions, Aster fruits can travel many kilometres away from the parent plant. This adaptation enables plants with wind dispersed fruits to more readily colonize bare areas of soil and maintain greater genetic variability.

Most of us have picked a dandelion and blown the fruits away but we rarely examine them closely or truly appreciate their beauty and functionality. Next time you see a dandelion look a little closer before you blow and admire one of the innovations of nature.

Goat's beard has the largest wind-dispersed seeds in Manitoba

The Cold Road

It is 7 am, somewhere on the curves near Woodlands, Manitoba, and the sky is still completely dark. The rain is coming down harder now and approaching headlights are blurred by the slicked windshield. I usually love the open road, but this driving is far from fun.

We are well past Lundar before the late dawn. The traffic has diminished now and the rain has eased a bit, but the wind is rising. At the Ashern Petro-Can we stop for fuel: unleaded for the Jeep and junk food for the humans. Ed takes over the wheel for the next monotonous stretch.

Today we plan to go to William Lake, well north of Grand Rapids, then back to Winnipeg before the evening has progressed too far: a drive of 1000 kilometres or so. Why are we subjecting ourselves to this, in this unpleasant wet weather?

Last summer, in the beautiful warmth of August, we found a greater quantity of interesting rock than we could safely haul back to Winnipeg at the time. In particular, two splendid specimens we discovered on the last day had to be left lying on the outcrop. These were very large slabs, both of which remarkably preserve portions of what appears to be a channel on an ancient tidal flat, filled with fossilized jellyfish! They are the sorts of unusual pieces that the Museum really needs, because they would be very useful for both exhibits and research, and I was determined that we would get them back to Winnipeg before winter.

Then the autumn got busy, very busy, and the trip to retrieve these pieces was placed on the back burner. I began anxiously scanning the calendar and weather forecasts, and determined that October 18th would be the ideal day to make this trip, assuming that it didn’t snow first! Field paleontology is very much a climate-dependent occupation, and we have done this trip north so many times that we know when winter is likely to close our window of opportunity.

So now Ed and I are in a rented Jeep, heading north past the black spruce,  yellow tamaracks and bare-branched aspen. At Fairford there is a tremendous flow of water past the bridge, and the summer’s pelicans are nowhere to be seen. Over the lip of the St. Martin impact crater the road is empty and desolate. Much of it has been repaved recently and is beautifully smooth, but toward the Pas Moraine we hit a rutted stretch and Ed has to slow down to avoid hydroplaning on the long pond under our right-hand tires.

At the old burn south of Grand Rapids, I recall the exact place where we saw a lynx last autumn.  All self-respecting lynxes are clearly hiding out in the dense brush on this nasty wet day!

We stop again at Grand Rapids for fuel. There is more than a half-tank remaining, but it will be a long drive before we are back here again and it is best not to take chances. Fortunately there is someone on duty at the Pelican Landing gas station, because it really wouldn’t be pleasant to “self serve” in the pouring rain.

I am driving now, up the curves and past the beautiful lakes of the Grand Rapids Uplands. We arrive at William Lake just a bit after noon. Now there is snow blasting in on a north wind, and the thermometer is reading a balmy +1 C.   Navigating slowly across the scree, I can see the two large slabs lying right where we left them. After six hours of driving, we now have 15 minutes of physical work: fold down the seat, spread the tarp, slip on gloves, and manhandle the rock into the back. We pause for a few photos, and are grateful that the outdoor work is so brief, because our hands are already frozen and numb.

Our hands thaw as the Jeep crawls back toward the highway. At the Grand Rapids bridge a solitary pelican flies past; perhaps this one was asleep and missed its flight south? Now we a bit of time for lunch at the Pelican Landing restaurant: smoked meat sandwiches, cream of celery soup, and coffee have never been more welcome. We say hello to a few familiar faces; I guess we are becoming “fixtures” here, but I am not sure when we will manage to get back again. It is an appropriate day for this sort of sombre thought.

Now it is time to confront the long road home. As it turns out, the weather for the drive back will be slightly more pleasant, and we cruise smoothly into Winnipeg just as darkness is setting in. It has been a lot of driving to pick up a couple of rocks, but very worthwhile: within a week it will be winter in the Uplands, and if the pieces had been left until spring they would have been heavily weathered and damaged by the winter’s extreme frost and ice.

Some Buggy's Watching Me

One of my favorite photographs is the one of a young chimpanzee reaching out to touch Jane Goodall’s face.  This photograph was taken many months after Jane has started quietly and patiently observing the chimpanzees.  Eventually her patience paid off and the chimps felt safe enough to make contact.  I love the idea of being so close to nature that nature wants to touch you back.

Last month I had a wildlife encounter of the entomological kind.  I was in Spruce Woods Provincial Park to observe the insect pollinators of the rare Hairy Prairie Clover (Dalea villosa) plant.  Like Jane, I found that that the best way to ensure good observations was to simply sit down, keep still and shut up.  Movement, especially sudden ones, and noise frightens the insects away.  Fortunately for me it doesn’t take months for insects to become accustomed to you.  After a few minutes of sitting still all sorts of marvelous insects the like of which I’ve never seen before were swarming over the plants.

As it turns out I wasn’t the only creature interested in observing strange animals.  I was the subject of much curiosity by my backbone-challenged subjects.  A long-legged wasp investigated my camera bag.  Then, a shiny copper bug landed on my hand and probed me with its proboscis.  A grasshopper jumped on my shoe and began delicately nibbling one of my laces.  A large cicada landed on my hip with a loud thump to check me out.  But the most thrilling moment was when a beautiful black butterfly landed on my wrist and started licking me to get the salts in my sweat.  It tickled and I giggled.  Then I sobered and got a bit teary: this lovely creature trusted me enough to make contact so that it could obtain something it needed to survive.

Read any scientific paper and you are presented with cold, hard facts and stoic observations.  Emotions do not belong in scientific journals.  Conclusions are restricted to what the data can tell you.  Scientists are trained to do this but it gives the public a distorted perception of what we are really like.  I don’t know any field biologists that don’t love nature, and haven’t been deeply and profoundly moved by what they’ve seen.  Jane Goodall learned something a long time ago: just as the animals being observed are changed by their experience, so is the observer.  In observing nature, you grow to love it and are compelled to help save it because you see the truth of our reality: we are all connected, and in losing a species we lose a part of ourselves.

The Mineral Exhibit

 If you visit this page occasionally and have been wondering about when the next blog post would be forthcoming, well, I had been wondering that too. I have begun new posts several times, but in each instance my focus has been pulled away by the same all-consuming activity: my time has been taken up by the completion of a mineral exhibit. This past week, we finally did the installation, so I thought I had might as well set those posts-in-progress aside yet again. Here, instead, are some photos of the exhibit.

Collections specialist Janis Klapecki and designer Stephanie Whitehouse work on the final location of one of the plexiglas specimen mounts.

At the Museum we had long recognized that a mineral exhibit was one of the features most lacking in the Earth History Gallery. Minerals are the basic building blocks of rocks and other geological materials, we have a great diversity of minerals in this province’s rocks, and of course minerals are often beautiful objects that are treasured by many collectors.

The giant amethyst now has its own gallery case (in the next post I will tell you how we got it there!).

For the past several years we have been collaborating with the Mineral Society of Manitoba to acquire specimens suitable for exhibit, and The Manitoba Museum Foundation and the Canadian Geological Foundation had kindly provided us with funding to construct cases. This exhibit is at the front end of the Earth History Gallery, where we only had space for a couple of cases, and the number of specimens and volume of text were quite limited, so this should have been a simple little exhibit project, no?

Beryls from eastern Manitoba (top), along with pyrites, feldspars, and base metal ores

No. Things are never simple when you have to develop an exhibit from scratch. And in this particular instance our design and exhibit staff were working to develop techniques that we had not tried before.  We had examined mineral exhibits in many other places (both in-person and through photographs) and had decided that we needed dark cases with the light really focused on the specimens.

The mid part of the case features a variety of minerals, including a Tanco rubellite (donated by Cabot Corporation) and samples of beautiful Michigan copper (the tree-like specimen was acquired and donated by the Mineral Society of Manitoba, John Biczok, and Tony Smith).

Stephanie Whitehouse, our designer,  wanted to try working more with metal and glass on this case, and she asked the workshop to look at ways plexiglas could be prepared to allow it to glow. Bert Valentin considered new lighting options (though he eventually settled on fibre optics similar to those in the Ancient Seas cases) and Marc Hébert had to develop new techniques to build cases using different construction materials. Lisa May and Wayne Switek constructed specimen mounts that look simple but had to hold the specimens just so. And once all the pieces were constructed, it still took the team most of last week to assemble them and make everything fit. Dealing with the giant amethyst (now informally rechristened The Mammothist) was a big piece of this process, so big that I will give it its own post in the near future!

This splendid millerite is from Thompson, source of some of the best examples of this unusual nickel mineral. It was acquired for the exhibit by the Mineral Society of Manitoba and The Manitoba Museum Foundation. (catalogue number M-3596)

If you visit the Gallery you will still see the old exhibits between the mineral cases and Ancient Seas, but the space is starting to develop quite a different feel.

For the first time ever, the Earth History Gallery has a title!

The Arizona-Manitoba Connection

For many Manitobans, the only connection we might have with Arizona involves a certain hockey team that left Winnipeg in 1996 for warmer climes. There are, though, other connections that involve organisms from the natural world other than coyotes as mascots!

What possible connection might there be between the Sonoran desert and Manitoba's boreal forest?

I recently returned from a family vacation to southern Arizona where we were hoping to catch up with some of the local bird and lizard specialties, as well as enjoy the truly incredible environment that Sonoran desert has to offer.

Rufous-crowned Sparrow (left) and Chuckwalla (right), special but expected desert denizens.

Although we were a little early because of the mid-March timing forced by the school break, we had several species of hummingbirds, and I finally managed to see roadrunner – a “jinx” bird that I had missed on previous trips.

Southern specialties, a Broad-billed Hummingbird (left) and an Ash-throated Flycatcher (right).

But these were desert species we were expecting. For me, the strangest sight among all our bird observations was finding boreal and subarctic species of sparrows hopping among the cacti! In retrospect, I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised – I know these species overwinter and migrate through the southern United States, including Arizona. And a few of Manitoba’s northern species have populations that breed in the mountainous areas of the south. Still, it came as a bit of a shock while tracking down Arizona desert specialities to instead run across White-crowned and Lincoln’s Sparrows that will be migrating through my backyard in less than a month! I hadn’t travelled all the way to Tucson to see them!

Lincoln's Sparrow (left) and White-crowned Sparrow (right), two species that occur in Manitoba but spend time in the Arizona desert, along with (occasionally) Manitoba Museum zoology curators.

The more I thought about it, though, I began to have a grudging respect for these common Manitoba species that kept showing up under prickly pears and organ pipe cactus. Many of the Arizona specialties basically hang out in desert all the time, whereas “our” migratory sparrows have to be able to deal with a huge range of habitat and conditions, from boreal and subarctic to desert. When we travel from north to south and are scrounging for food, we are relieved to find familiar forage in local produce stores carrying recognizable brands; these little sparrows manage to scratch up a meal whether under a saguaro cactus in a desert or a spruce tree in a bog – no shared seed or insect ‘brands’ between those localities.

A White-crowned Sparrow nest found in July 2008 at Nueltin Lake, Manitoba near the border with Nunavut, a long way and a very different place than the Arizona desert where they spend part of the non-breeding season. An arrow points to the well-concealed nest in subarctic scrub (left), and the nest with four eggs revealed (right).

So the Arizona/Manitoba connection runs deep on many fronts. Much as humans find a way to chase a puck in the frozen north and the Phoenix desert, our sparrows manage to raise a family in the north every summer and eke out a living in the desert in winter.  But unlike the puck chasers, the sparrows haven’t decided to move down to Arizona permanently.

How to Disassemble an Artefact

Recently, conservator Lisa May worked with the Museum’s Operational Services staff to smoothly disassemble an artefact so it could be moved out of a basement storage area. The artefact is a display case that came from a prominent Winnipeg business, Winnipeg Music Supply, which closed in 1984, at which time the display case was donated to the Manitoba Museum. 

It was stored for many years at the Museum’s storage building on Lily St., in a basement room. In 2010, a pipe break and subsequent water infiltration led to the decision to remove all artefacts stored at basement level, due to concerns of a major mould outbreak (See blog post “Lily St. Storage Move”, Sept. 3, 2010). Every other artefact was removed from the basement, but this display case was too big and heavy to take out as it was. Finally, last month it was taken apart; and last week, it was hoisted up onto the main floor of the storage building.

Taking the case apart was no simple operation. Lisa and carpenter Marc Hébert spent considerable time examining the case to see how it was put together. Lisa drew a diagram indicating which areas should be worked on first, noting things to check as they went along.

First of all, the drawers and all separate pieces were removed. Then the interior display surface was removed, and next the marble trim from the bottom. The pieces were all numbered for ease of reassembly. Then the back was taken off, and the case lowered onto its back side. The top was carefully pulled off. After that, the sides came apart quite easily, and finally the two halves were separated from the centre column.

Display case before beginning disassembly

The marble trim was labeled for identification

The top, all one piece, was carefully pulled off

Removing the centre column

The pieces were lifted to the main level of the building using a hoist, and now sit waiting, with all the other artefacts, for the time when they will be moved into a different storage facility – for this building will be demolished to make way for a much-needed multilevel parkade.

 Although a relatively small project, it required careful planning and many hands (and backs!) to accomplish without damaging the artefact. Our Operational Services staff are professional and experienced, but not conservators, so Lisa’s input and guidance was required. Everything went well, and we look forward to the day (coming soon, we think) when this case will be moved into an improved storage environment.

Door to Door: A Collecting Trip

The Manitoba Museum recently acquired a number of objects that add to an existing collection. The Wilson family collection of bottles and crocks is an extensive one, with over 1600 artefacts.  The Wilsons contacted the Museum with an offer to donate a related collection of ceramic footwarmers and various Medalta ware. Curator Roland Sawatzky recommended we accept the offered items; the subject went to our Collection Committee, which approved it on the curator’s recommendation. Follow us now through the process of preparing for and completing the acquisition.

 Preparation

We had been provided a list of items. Knowing the number was roughly 150, with 49 of those being ceramic footwarmers, I collected 35 “Banker’s box” size boxes. An intern, Megan Narvey, cut pieces of foam for packing and placed them in every box. She also cut up some extra bubble wrap for packing.

 Pickup

Three people were involved in the pickup: Curator Andrea Dyck (Contemporary Cultures and Immigration), acting for Roland, who was undertaking fieldwork; Nancy Anderson, Collections Assistant, Human History; and Megan Narvey, Collections and Conservation intern. We rented a minivan, and all the boxes fit into the back. Arriving at the donor’s house, the empty boxes were brought in, and packing proceeded. Luckily, all the objects were stored on shelves in one area in the basement, which made packing faster. The boxes were then loaded into the van, and staff returned to the Museum. The Deed of Gift forms had been signed at the house, so the objects were legally ours to take.

Footwarmers packed in box

Unloading and Unpacking

The boxes were put onto carts and brought into the Museum, into the elevator and up to the sixth floor History Lab. 

Here is the Medalta ware unpacked in the History lab

The footwarmers in the lab

Next Steps

With all items removed from boxes, the next step is to process them. Each must be assigned a catalogue number and entered into the collection database. They also must be physically numbered, catalogued, photographed and condition reported, before being put into their permanent storage location.

More than meets the eye

The actual collection trip took approximately a half day. However, the preparation took about the same amount of time, and the next steps will be far more time-consuming. With cataloguing and condition reporting, many entries can be cut and pasted, and the conservators can use a checklist to speed the process; however, I still anticipate that the processing of these 150 or so objects will take person-hours adding up to weeks of work!

Unless you work in a museum, most likely you have no idea of the details involved in collections work. The steps I’ve described are required for all new acquisitions. This is a glimpse into the day to day tasks the Collections and Conservation department staff tackle, although it’s just one part of what we do.