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…
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…
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…
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…
Last week in the Star Tribune, Bill Marchel of Brainerd, Minnesota contributed an article on the utility of snow in tracking animal behavior, “… there’s a tattletale residing in our woods and fields. Lying, waiting, it is able to recall,…
As a reward for surviving temperatures that reached 20 below zero just a few days ago, for the Friday Flora we will travel to the spring of 1937 to sit alongside a University of Minnesota botany class atop Gwinn’s Bluff…
The Bell Museum of Natural History records contain more than just the administrative paperwork of a developing natural history museum. The collection also contains the personal papers of Thomas Sadler Roberts – the man who oversaw the museum in infancy…
We did it! We made it through our first major snowstorm of the season. Traffic made us late to work, we were chilled by the cold wind breezing past our cheeks, and we were forced to round up all of…
We’ve been waiting for another snowfall to share this little guy – a snowshoe rabbit. Walter J. Breckenridge captured these images of a snowshoe rabbit near the north shore of Lake Superior in the winter of 1927. Breckenridge was then…