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 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.

Tell Me A Story

Recently, I was able to travel to New York City to visit museums in Manhattan to research how immigration history is being presented at other museums.  I was interested in three in particular: the Ellis Island Immigration Museum (http://www.nps.gov/elis/index.htm), the Lower East Side Tenement Museum (http://www.tenement.org/), and the Museum of Chinese in America (http://www.mocanyc.org/).  Each of these museums focuses on a different element of immigration history and approaches the subject in very unique ways.  They are also vastly different in their focus and scope, from the Museum of Chinese in America, whose mandate it is to present the history of one particular ethnic group, to the Ellis Island Immigration Museum, which seeks to share the story of Ellis Island and the millions of immigrants of all backgrounds who came through its gates.

The Ellis Island Immigration Museum is housed in the main building on Ellis Island.  This was the most active immigrant processing station in the United States, from its opening in 1892 to when it was abandoned in 1954.  During this period, it welcomed and processed over 12 million immigrants.  In 1965, the site was incorporated into the Statue of Liberty Monument and made a National Parks Service site; however, it was only in 1986, with the centennial of the Statue of Liberty, that work at the main building on Ellis Island began and restored it to its appearance in the years 1918-1924.  The Ellis Island Immigration Museum officially opened in the main building in 1990.

As in many other museums housed in historical buildings, part of the enjoyment of being there is the experience of walking the same steps and being within the same walls that held so much history.  Ellis Island is a grand experience, from the expansive Baggage Room on the ground floor to the soaring ceilings in the Registry Room on the third.

Continue reading HERE

Anniversary For A Museum Outlaw

The 4th Floor 'Outlaw'

Published by Dr.Mooi, Curator of Zoology
rmooi@manitobamuseum.ca
February 8, 2012

Just outside my office on the 4th floor of the Museum is a big, hairy outlaw that can stare anybody down. It’s the mounted head of one of the original ‘outlaw buffalo’ of the Pablo/Allard herd of Plains Bison (Bison bison bison), the most significant of the private herds purchased by the Canadian government that helped to bring these magnificent animals back from the brink of extinction.

By 1890, it is believed that there were no bison remaining in Canada. Several private herds started from wild stock during the 1870s were obtained by the Canada government beginning in 1897. The Pablo/Allard herd, the origin of the Museum ‘outlaw’, had its beginnings in about 1872 when Walking Coyote, a member of the Pend d’Oreille First Nation, captured a handful of animals south of the Alberta/Montana border.

Read the full blogpost here.

VLOG - Ancient Pottery

Here at the Manitoba Museum, 99% of the work that we do goes on behind the scenes. Explore our very first vlog post as Curator of Archaeology, Kevin Brownlee talks about unearthing Cree Pottery.

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