Pioneer Life
Earlier this week we introduced you to Ernest M. Brown, a taxidermist in Warren, MN who served as a field guide to Thomas Sadler Roberts when Roberts visited Warren and nearby Thief Lake and Mud Lake in the summer of…
photography
Monday at Minnehaha
The Pioneer Press recently published an article about public safety in one of Minneapolis’s oldest city parks, “Frozen Minnehaha Falls are cool, but visitors should heed warnings.” Minnehaha Park’s Minnehaha Falls are certainly a sight in the winter. The falling…
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…
Wednesdays with Walter: Hibernating Bears
An excerpt from My Life in Natural History, by Walter J. Breckenridge, former preparator (1926-1946) and director (1946-1970) of the Bell Museum of Natural History, illustrated by images from the Bell Museum records at the University Archives: “Back in the…
Nature Paparazzi
In Hollywood, photographers who take pictures of celebrities going about their day to day routines are known as “paparazzi.” Might the same term be applied to this group of young men seen photographing this fawn in Itasca State Park on…
Tuesday Tweet: Baby Hawks
While it may be more common in this day and age to refer to little animals as “babies,” the slightly more academic terms “young” and “juvenile” were used by Thomas Sadler Roberts when he noted the age of the birds…
Friday Flora: Picnic Amongst the Pines
When he wasn’t in the field making bird observations in pursuit of his ornithological hobby, Thomas Sadler Roberts shared his love of nature with his family members. Here Roberts is pictured having lunch with Mrs. Roberts and their three children…
Friday Flora: Hats Off!
While faculty from the Department of Botany explored the state to identify plant life in the early 1900s, department photographer C.J. Hibbard not only provided photographic documentation of their observations, but also took the opportunity to explore a bit of…
Bieber… I mean beaver.
Ever since I came across the newspaper clippings and annual reports that made reference to two live beavers that occupied a small pool outside of the Animal Biology building on the University of Minnesota campus from 1917-1924, I have been…
Tuesday Tweet
From the Bell Museum glass plate negative collection: – Young Cuckoo, front view, on finger, June 16, 1898, Waconia, MN – Young Cuckoo, back view, on finger, June 16, 1898, Waconia, MN…