Birds

Tuesday Tweet: May I present to you…

… a baby Avocet! – Avocet, one young on hand, Turtle Lake, North Dakota, 1925 Museum taxidermist Jenness Richardson captured these young Avocets with his camera while on a collecting trip to Turtle Lake in North Dakota in 1925. -…


Monday Mystery: The First Minneapolis Auto Show?

Car enthusiasts are currently descending upon Minneapolis to attend the Twin Cities Auto Show which opened over the weekend. The latest and greatest in chrome and horsepower will delight automobile enthusiasts through March 16. After seeing several advertisements on local…


Wednesdays with Walter: Great Horned Owls

This Wednesday in our series chronicling the adventures of former Bell Museum preparator and director Walter J. Breckenridge, we share just how far – or high – Breckenridge went in order to study birds. In his autobiography, My Life in…



Tuesday Tweet: The Winter Bird-Life of Minnesota

In February of 1916, Thomas Sadler Roberts, associate curator of the Zoological Museum, released the first of what he termed “Occasional Papers,” a series of bulletins issued from the “Zoological Division of the Geological and Natural History Survey.” The content…


Wednesdays with Walter: The Spruce Grouse

Well it is Wednesday again, which means it is time to revisit the wilderness adventures of Walter Breckenridge, former preparator, curator, and director of the Bell Museum of Natural History. His description from his autobiography, My Life in Natural History,…


Tuesday Tweet: Motion Study

I’ve been watching a lot of slow motion instant replays recently as a result of being an avid watcher of the coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia. Did the snowboarder/skier get enough rotation in their jump?…


Tuesday Tweet: A favor for your father

As I mentioned yesterday, dozens of negatives in the Bell Museum records aren’t about nature, but are of a personal nature as they contain images of Thomas Sadler Roberts’s family. The presence of family portraits amongst portraits of birds and…


Tuesday Tweet: Of Birds, Behavior, and Blinds

Followers of the Exploring blog will recognize that since we began the project we’ve been exposed to a lot of birds due to the content of the collections that we are scanning. When you digitize and process the personal and…