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.