Afghanistan Memorial Fragment

This September I was thrilled to be able to go on a tour of southern Manitoba with my colleagues here at the Museum. Our mission: to learn more about the people, places and wildlife that calls this part of the province home to generate ideas for new gallery exhibits.

One of the most memorable things about our trip was neither a person, nor a place, nor an organism. In fact, it wasn’t even an animate object – it was a force: the wind. For anyone who has spent time on the treeless prairies you know what I mean when I say that the wind has an almost tangible physical presence. Standing on the Assiniboine River valley slope on a lovely patch of mixed grass prairie near Minota, I almost felt that I would get blown away along with the Dotted Blazingstar and Hairy Golden Aster seeds. On a windy day such as that, it was easy to understand why so many prairie plants evolved wind-dispersed seeds. Plants in the Aster family are particularly adept at becoming windborne due to the extreme modification of their sepals.

Most of us have picked a dandelion and blown the fruits away but we rarely examine them closely or truly appreciate their beauty and functionality. Next time you see a dandelion look a little closer before you blow and admire one of the innovations of nature.

One of the problems with being a botanist working at a museum is that most of the botanical specimens cannot be displayed in an exhibit. The bulk of the collection consists of herbarium specimens (dried, pressed plants mounted on paper) that are very fragile and light sensitive. As a result they usually can’t be displayed for long (or at all) without being damaged. Further, a pressed plant is only a two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional organism and can’t really convey the true beauty of the species. As a result, I need to be innovative when creating exhibits in ways that my colleagues with their fancy artifacts, skeletons, and fossils don’t have to be.

One of the ways that we represent plants in our galleries is by creating models of what the plant looks like when it’s alive. Our artists will go into the field, photograph a plant and then collect a specimen of it. Back at the Museum they take colour notes, do drawings, and take more photographs, to get as much information as they can. They then dissect the plant, make molds of each part, and later those parts are re-created out of a variety of materials, like waxes and resins. After painting all the plant parts, each of the pieces is then put together like a giant three-dimensional puzzle. The Western Prairie Fringed Orchid (Platanthera praeclara) model, our most complicated one, consists of 300 parts!

Another way that people will be able to appreciate the Museum’s botanical collection, as well as another hard-to-exhibit group of organisms-pollinating insects-is via our upcoming Prairie Pollination virtual exhibit. With funds from the Virtual Museum of Canada, the Heritage Grants Program of the Manitoba Government and The Manitoba Museum Foundation, this exhibit will feature over 200 specimens of prairie plants and pollinating insects. Visitors will be able to see photographs of the Museum’s specimens, photographs of the organisms in the field and interpretive information on how plants and pollinators interact with each other. Video tours of native prairie and The Manitoba Museum’s collection vault, learning resources for teachers and a variety of games and activities will help visitors learn more about these organisms and why they are important. Full and temporary staff (including me, of course) are busy preparing the content for this new exhibit, which will open in October of 2013. Prairie Pollination will be an innovative way for people to access information on recent Museum research and collections in an interesting and user-friendly way.

To help The Manitoba Museum obtain additional funds to create a mobile phone application that will link our collections with restored and remnant prairies where these organisms live (a virtual biocache) please consider voting for the “Click, Text and Pollinate” project at the Aviva Community Fund website, click here.

One of my favorite photographs is the one of a young chimpanzee reaching out to touch Jane Goodall’s face. This photograph was taken many months after Jane has started quietly and patiently observing the chimpanzees. Eventually her patience paid off and the chimps felt safe enough to make contact. I love the idea of being so close to nature that nature wants to touch you back.

Last month I had a wildlife encounter of the entomological kind. I was in Spruce Woods Provincial Park to observe the insect pollinators of the rare Hairy Prairie Clover (Dalea villosa) plant. Like Jane, I found that that the best way to ensure good observations was to simply sit down, keep still and shut up. Movement, especially sudden ones, and noise frightens the insects away. Fortunately for me it doesn’t take months for insects to become accustomed to you. After a few minutes of sitting still all sorts of marvelous insects the like of which I’ve never seen before were swarming over the plants.

As it turns out I wasn’t the only creature interested in observing strange animals.  I was the subject of much curiosity by my backbone-challenged subjects. A long-legged wasp investigated my camera bag. Then, a shiny copper bug landed on my hand and probed me with its proboscis. A grasshopper jumped on my shoe and began delicately nibbling one of my laces. A large cicada landed on my hip with a loud thump to check me out. But the most thrilling moment was when a beautiful black butterfly landed on my wrist and started licking me to get the salts in my sweat. It tickled and I giggled. Then I sobered and got a bit teary: this lovely creature trusted me enough to make contact so that it could obtain something it needed to survive.

Read any scientific paper and you are presented with cold, hard facts and stoic observations. Emotions do not belong in scientific journals. Conclusions are restricted to what the data can tell you. Scientists are trained to do this but it gives the public a distorted perception of what we are really like. I don’t know any field biologists that don’t love nature, and haven’t been deeply and profoundly moved by what they’ve seen. Jane Goodall learned something a long time ago: just as the animals being observed are changed by their experience, so is the observer. In observing nature, you grow to love it and are compelled to help save it because you see the truth of our reality: we are all connected, and in losing a species we lose a part of ourselves.