Posts on Exploring have been short and sweet lately. That is because like this Black-billed Cuckoo, Exploring project staff are hanging in there. We are clamoring down and racing to the finish. Another collection was added to the UMedia Archives…
The Golden Gate Parks Conservancy has written a quiz, “What Bird Personality Fits Your Bill?” to help you determine what kind of bird you would be based on “distinct avian phenotypes.” I got Wrentit. What’s your bird personality?…
Back in November I shared the only then known image of turkeys from the ~6,900 glass plate and film negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records. A good portion of the negatives were produced by Thomas Sadler Roberts…
With over 6,900 black and white negatives in the Bell Museum of Natural History records, we know of at least one that is true in coloration: – Albino Grackle, circa 1940 To learn more about color abnormalities in birds, read…
In his autobiography, My Life in Natural History, former Bell Museum preparator and director Walter Breckenridge provided a description of the Peregrine Falcon and an introduction to the sport of falconry: “One of my favorite birds is the peregrine falcon….
… 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. -…
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…
Part of the thrill for me in working on the Exploring Minnesota’s Natural History grant project is traveling to all sorts of new places around the state with each new image from the collections that come across my desk. As…
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?…
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…