Thomas Sadler Roberts

Tuesday Tweet: Don’t forget an outfit!

To photograph a Least Flycatcher, you could stand on the ground and point your camera up towards the nest: – Least Flycatcher’s nest from distance, June 11, 1899, Heron Lake, Jackson County Then again, you could also set up an…


Cumbersome Collecting

One hundred and thirteen years ago at around this time of the year, Thomas Sadler Roberts set out on yet another trip to observe the birds of the state of Minnesota. Roberts kept written records of his ornithological outings in…


Tuesday Tweet: Long-eared Owl

At the end of June 1900, Thomas Sadler Roberts traveled to northwestern Minnesota to meet colleague E.L. Brown and photograph birds in and around Warren in Marshall County. To prepare for the trip, in which they would traverse the old…


Friday Flora

This week’s Friday Flora is not from the collection of the Department of Botany as regularly featured, but comes from the documentary nature photography of Thomas Sadler Roberts. Though birds are Roberts’s most common subject, several examples of flora and…


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…


A love affair with birds – and photography

Last week I shared some of my findings from background research on the Bell Museum of Natural History. After finishing the first book consulted, the Annals of the Museum of Natural History, I moved on to book #2: a biography…


Get out of my nest!

Get out of my nest! – 357, Franklin’s gulls [juv.], Heron Lake, Minn, 6-14-99 (glass plate negative) This young Franklin’s Gull nesting on Heron Lake in Jackson County, MN doesn’t seem too eager to have a visitor. The hand reaching…


Annual Report: Live beavers

To begin research on the history of the Bell Museum of Natural History, which originated from the collected geological specimens of the 1872 Minnesota Geology and Natural History Survey, the first resource I turned to was the Annals of the…