Patterns from Nature
So is this life as we know it now in Minnesota – life in the “polar vortex”? We are cold. We are exhausted by the sheer amount of effort required to put on so many layers and articles of clothing….
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Friday Flora: Spring Semester?
This week marked the start of the spring semester at the University of Minnesota, yet as the temperature remained below zero in the Twin Cities for most of the week, it didn’t feel very spring-like on campus. Thanks to former…
Itasca State Park: The Headwaters Then and Now
In early July my fiancé and I, along with his brother and wife, spent two nights and three days camping at Schoolcraft State Park in northern Minnesota. The park is named after Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, the geologist that discovered the…
Wednesdays with Walter: Duck Hawk, a.k.a. Peregrine Falcon
In Chapter 9 of his autobiography, My Life in Natural History, Walter J. Breckenridge shared his field experiences with Birds of Prey. In his role as taxidermist and exhibit preparator at the Museum of Natural History, Breckenridge was tasked…
Tuesday Tweet: Rockin’ Robins
– Robins, tame, and Mrs. Julius Hortvel of Minneapolis, August 12, 1924….
Friday Fungi: 100,001 and counting…
The New Year was especially exciting at the University Archives, as during the second week of 2014 the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History project surpassed 100,000 individual scans. To date, over 110,000 archival materials – photographs, negatives, pages from field notebooks,…
Wednesdays with Walter: Bears in the BWCA
A few months ago, I checked out Walter J. Breckenridge’s autobiography My Life in Natural History, which was published by the Bell Museum in 2009. In the book, the taxidermist and curator (from 1926-1946) and eventual director (from 1946-1970) of…
Tuesday Tweet: Behind the Scenes
In an August blog post here on Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History we shared the images of a group of young Chickadees perched on top of a stump. These obviously posed images were taken at Brook Lodge near Lake City, Minnesota…
Oh Where, oh Where, is Ware?
Over the course of the past eight months I have received a tour of the natural landscape of Minnesota as it appeared over one hundred years ago. The glass plate negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records and…
The Survey, Year III
After a brief and hastily conducted “retrospective” survey in the fall of 1872, followed by a full year foray filled with salt determinations and peat assessments in 1873, Newton Horace Winchell, the director of the Minnesota Geological and Natural History…