Blog Archives - Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History

Collections August 2018: Touchable Taxidermy

A bat. A gopher. An ermine. This month we welcome these new additions to a special part of the Museum’s holdings: Our Education Collection. When we talk about our Collections, we often talk about the distinction between different kinds of objects, like our geology specimens or anthropological artifacts. Another significant line we draw is less about the nature of an item and more about the purpose such an item serves in the life of the Museum. In our primary Collections we include materials that are actively preserved and protected, whether they present a unique avenue of research or are simply too fragile to be handled without damage. Regardless of their condition, an important criteria for these “museum quality” items is that they are accompanied by sufficient data (e.g. field notes/locality, age, history of object, collector id, etc.) to form the basis for scientific research.

In contrast, the Education Collection consists of those specimens and artifacts that can engage more directly with the general public. Though we may have limited information about these individual specimens and artifacts, they can still support experiential learning through our programs, pop-ups and workshops. They include stones you can heft, furs you can feel, and jaws you can manipulate, all to gain a more hands-on and tactile observation of the natural world. When we are given the opportunity to accept a specimen donation, we gather as much information as we can about it to help us determine whether it belongs in the general Collections or in our Education Collection. If we expect items to be handled on a regular basis, we also consider whether they are safe to touch. Traces of arsenic from dated taxidermy processes sometimes linger in mounts and dioramas, for example.

When we were offered the specimens featured in this month’s Close-Up, we knew they were great candidates for our Education Collections because they already had a history of being handled. Gifted by a local teacher for the visually impaired, the donation included several small mammals, a bird skeleton and nest, and a red fox. In this context they have been used as an opportunity for blind and visually impaired students to gain a greater understanding of animals through touch. While these specimens were collected in various locations across the West Coast, we can trace their origin as instructional materials to the Palo Alto Unified School District.

The use of taxidermy in visually impaired education and programming has a long-standing presence in natural history museums. As early as 1913, the Sunderland Museum in the United Kingdom offered programs and classes for blind and visually impaired children and adults to touch animal specimens as well as historical and anthropological artifacts. Pictures of these programs are publicly available through the Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums’ Seeing through Touch photo collection. Similarly, in the digital collections of the American Museum of Natural History, a collection of photographs taken between 1914 and 1927 documents public school class visits for blind and visually impaired students. In these photos of what were mostly called “sight conservation classes,” you can see students clustered around a hippopotamus or handling globes of the Earth and Moon.

Today, teachers still use taxidermy to educate visually impaired students. Several decades-old specimens populate the library at the California School for the Blind, for example, where children can still explore them. These specimens range from a racoon to a coyote to a small pig, though a constant favorite is the bear. While they currently serve as an informal opportunity for students to gain experiential knowledge of animal traits, in previous years they have been used in formal classroom settings.

Stop by the Museum this month to get a feel for this Close-Up and the unique history these specimens represent.

August 2018: Reflecting and Looking Forward

Group of children checking out the tidepool As many of you know, I will leave my position as Executive Director in late August to join my husband in the Pacific Northwest, where he has started an incredible new job opportunity. It is a bittersweet time for me as I prepare to leave this special museum and our wonderful community. As I reach the end of my tenure here, I have reflected on the many accomplishments our great team of staff, Board and volunteers has achieved since I took the lead in February 2015.

We have expanded and strengthened our public and school programs, created more dynamic gallery experiences, and renewed efforts for better management of the Museum’s collections. Behind the scenes, we have established a strong operational infrastructure to support our expanded efforts. We have experienced increases in attendance, membership and giving – all while building a more financially resilient organization. I am so proud of the work we have accomplished together and of the Museum we are becoming.

During the past eight months, our staff and Board have worked together to craft a strategic plan to lead the Museum for the next three years. This plan will guide the organization in its priorities, activities and initiatives through the year 2021. It includes key strategic goals, the measurable objectives and tasks to accomplish them, and a comprehensive financial model with which to realize them.

Our Museum has made tremendous strides in the last three years and this new strategic plan outlines an equally ambitious set of goals for the next three years. These goals center on: science education and stewardship, visitor experiences and audience diversification, collections care and accessibility, community partnerships, organizational sustainability, and facility revitalizations. These strategic themes attest to our commitment to engage diverse audiences in meaningful interactions with nature and science that educate and inspire.

The Museum’s new plan reflects the creativity and mission-driven dedication of many individuals. I am so thankful to the community members, staff and Board who contributed their perspectives and ideas during the process. Together, our hopes for the Museum and our community have brought the plan to life. I am confident that, through the collaboration of our talented staff, Board and community partners, the goals we now aspire to achieve will in time become milestones of which we will be deeply proud.

In the coming weeks, we will formally announce the plan and make it available to all. I hope you will embrace it with us and support the Museum as it continues to strengthen and thrive in the future.

Thank you,

Heather Moffat McCoy

Marisa Gomez: Community Education and Collaboration Manager

Meet Marisa: author, certified naturalist, seasoned trivia host, and procurer of art-friendly plant materials. Marisa has elevated the Museum by wearing many hats over the years, but we now know her as our Education Coordinator – a role she’s held since 2016. (Note: Marisa currently holds the role of Community Education and Collaboration Manager)

If you’ve enjoyed the Museum’s social media posts, then you’ve already seen Marisa’s handiwork at play. As the voice of our social media, she keeps our digital community abreast of the Museum’s many events, and helps others to forge connections with nature before they even walk through our doors.

She also leads the Museum’s onsite school programs, coordinates group visits, helps orchestrate our public programs, and specializes in immersing our visitors in the culture and stewardship practices of the native people of Santa Cruz, the Amah Mutsun.

Marisa first joined our team as a volunteer in 2013, shortly after earning her B.A. in creative writing from San Jose State University. She came to the Museum to learn the area, meet new people and conduct research for her writing. She soon discovered her passion for teaching others about the traditions of Santa Cruz’s native people when she became a docent.

Today, Marisa is a certified naturalist under the University of California’s Naturalist Program. She helps to educate the Museum’s team of docents, and strives to help others learn and make use of traditional knowledge bestowed by native cultures of Santa Cruz.

“I’m most proud of our new program series, Amah Mutsun: Then and Now,” she said. “By visiting areas of cultural significance and using native plants to create pieces of art, we connect our community with the native people of this amazing place we call home in a way that empowers and amplifies the voices of the Amah Mutsun.”

Her expertise extends beyond natural history, though, and well into the world of trivia. As occasional trivia host to Santa Cruz’s Red Room, 99 Bottles and the Museum over the past five years, Marisa has generated thousands of trivia questions spanning a variety of subjects.

She’s especially fascinated by the connections people form with plants, be they for art, tool use or nourishment. Marisa aims to forge those connections through our many workshops, where visitors can get their hands dirty by extracting natural dyes, weaving baskets, or printing unique images of local algae, among other activities.

“When people rely on something,” she said, “they’re more likely to care about it. And stewardship starts with that initial connection. The greater the connection, the more likely you are to protect it when it’s threatened.”

This post was updated on October 2022 to list Marisa’s current title.

July 2018: Examining Our Legacy

Our founder Laura Hecox and clippings of her published works

Our museum was built on the curiosity of a young girl. Our founder Laura Hecox’s love of nature started when she was a child living at Lighthouse Point and continued throughout her life. Her fascination with the natural world led her to develop her collections which form the basis of our museum. These collections are a diverse assemblage of shells, fossils, minerals, cultural artifacts, and curiosities. Although we are conservers of Laura’s collections, we know relatively little about the collector herself. While she left meticulously cataloged collections notes, she kept no known diary or personal correspondence. We do, however, have her scrapbooks. These treasured books provide a glimpse into Laura’s interests and the world around her.

The Museum is currently undertaking a special project to learn more about the personal side of our founder: an online exploration called The Naturalist’s Scrapbook. Our Collections Specialist Kathleen Aston, in partnership with the Santa Cruz Public Libraries, has designed this new online participatory project featuring one of Laura’s original scrapbooks. By viewing digital versions of the scrapbook pages and identifying the topics, titles, authors and dates of its clippings, participants can help us to build a richer understanding of our museum’s history, as well as the natural and cultural history of late 19th century Santa Cruz. The scrapbook pages provide a window into Laura’s world and what was intriguing to her. Her interests on the page were just as diverse as her collections!

Over a century later, at the heart of our museum remains the same spirit of discovery and love of the natural world that Laura exemplified. All that we do through our programs and exhibits focuses on sharing the joy of discovery and growing that understanding and appreciation of the natural world that Laura valued throughout her life.

This month, we have a range of opportunities to engage your curiosity and inspire you to see nature in a new light. Tomorrow we are premiering our July exhibit in the Summer Art Series – “Brink: The Art of Conservation” by Diana Walsworth. Diana’s show explores her love of the wild outdoors, using her unusual painting process of acrylics by sewing needle. Please join us for our First Friday opening reception tomorrow, July 5, at 5pm.

On July 18, our monthly Naturalist Night will discuss Sustainable Groundwater Management in Santa Cruz County . On July 21, we are hosting “Cyanotypes of the Sea”, a photographic printing workshop focused on local algae. And on July 28, we are proud to partner with the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band on a guided walk exploring “Indigenous Land Stewardship at Quiroste Valley, Then and Now.”

We hope you will join us for these great programs – whether at the Museum, out in nature, or online.

Best,
Heather Moffat McCoy
Executive Director

Collections July 2018: Laura Hecox’s Catalog Books

This July we are taking a closer look at one of Laura Hecox’s catalog books. We have several books associated with our foundational collection, and this particular one is a small leather bound volume entitled “Shell-Book Freshwater Shells 1-244”. Although it belonged to our founder, this book came to the Museum accompanied by the cabinet featured in our Naturalist exhibit, which was built by Adna Hecox for his daughter. Due to Laura’s family connections, these items spent many years at the California School for the Deaf Historical Museum before making their way back to Santa Cruz in the early 1990s.

We’ve been thinking a lot about the documents in our Laura Hecox collection due to our recent project, the Naturalist’s Scrapbook. In this project, which you can find from the Collections page of the Museum’s website, participants can help us explore digitized news clippings from Laura’s late 19th century scrapbook clippings. Not only do these catalog books and scrapbooks possess historical and scientific value, they are also precious because they are the some of the few documents we have that were made by Laura. We can also use them to think about two different but complementary ways of being a naturalist.

Looking first at Shell Book 1-244, we have a plain and straightforward document with entries describing items in Laura’s collection. We have several such books, for shells, fossil shells, and a “Curiosity book” for curio artifacts of historical and anthropological nature. It is possible that more existed, but we see from the ones we have that Laura was following good cataloging form and highlighting meaningful scientific distinctions in separating her collection by type. In this vein, shell specimens are found in shell books, whereas artifacts made from shells are found in the curio book. Another thing we notice about these catalog entries is that they are succinct: entries include the specimen name, a citation for the identification, the location it was found, and the name and locality of the person who provided the specimen. One such example is specimen:

“65 Bythinella Binneyi
Tryon
Santa Cruz, Cal.
Presented by Mrs. R. H.
Rigg of Santa Cruz, Cal.”

This entry directly follows the text, which was written entirely in cursive. Following standard formatting for scientific names, we would italicize the name and make the species epithet lowercase, like this: “Bythinella binneyi”. Some items are missing information, and sometimes an item will have a name added in pencil above an ink record, suggesting a continual updating of the catalog.

Parallel with Shell Book 1 – 244, we are also displaying a copy of a clipping from Laura’s scrapbook, which came to our attention through the Naturalist’s Scrapbook project. Scrapbooking is a more abstract information-gathering practice than shell collecting, and Laura’s scrapbooks reflect her varied interests, with a strong focus in natural history. Entitled “California Shells. An Interesting Report on Conchology,” the featured article opens by acknowledging that the shells of California have “not as yet been fully described”, and then goes on to detail several specimens, with particular focus on their pretty colorations. It then introduces the collection of a San Franciscan, one Rev. Dr. Joseph Rowell, who had an extensive shell collection and spent several years on collecting missions up and down the Pacific coast in the employ of the Smithsonian. Rowell is quoted in the article, describing his collections, his scientific endeavors, and his opinions on the functions of shell features.

For a woman like Laura, herself known as an avid conchologist, one wonders what information she was collecting with this article. Perhaps she was acquainted with Rowell, given that her collection was popularly known and her lighthouse was in his expedition area. Perhaps his observations on various shells confirmed or contradicted her own. The clipping also alerts the reader to the latest list of California shells published by the Smithsonian, noting that

“. . . this list is probably the latest contribution to our knowledge of California shells. It would, however, scarcely interest the amateur, as most of the additions to shell-lore consist in alternations in scientific nomenclature, or notes of the localities for species rarely found. Still this same list is of value to the general public, as it includes descriptions of two new California species . . .”

Perhaps this article alerted her to the publishing of a new list of shells – given her interest in updating her catalogues for nomenclature, she many have found this to be just the thing. Or perhaps it put new species on her collecting or trading radar – for many of her shells were presented by folks from beyond California to New York and England. Whether Laura considered herself an amateur or a member of the general public, whether she was collecting shells or clipping news, her work reflects two of the many different ways that you can be a naturalist and observe and gather information about the natural world.

Collections June 2018: An Ohlone Basket

At the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History, we are fortunate to be able to provide local residents and visitors access to one the few existing historical Ohlone baskets. Many of the remaining historical Ohlone baskets are in museums as far away as Europe and even Russia. Here, so close to its origin, it can better be seen within its historical and cultural context.

Our records describe this basket as a “relic of Mission Santa Cruz.” Location of origin helps us understand the history of baskets in cases like this, where we do not have any information about the weaver. Looking at historical baskets, basketry scholars also rely on the presence of technical features that distinguish the baskets from those of other California tribes to identify baskets made by Ohlone peoples, as well as the date the basket was collected and any history of being handed down in local families. The necessity of relying on these clues is partly due to the legacy of colonization. Cultural interruption like that of the Spanish mission system disrupted Native lifeways and traditions through the use of forced manual labor, severe punishments, and the spread of deadly disease.

In about 1885, fifty years or so after the Mission system was officially ended, this basket was collected by James Frazier Lewis. A Santa Cruz resident, Lewis was the son of Patty Reed Lewis, a survivor of the infamous Donner Party. This Ohlone basket was gifted by Robert Knapp, an heir to the Lewis estate, in 1945 to the Museum, where it has been on display or on loan at various points throughout its history.

The basket itself is a gift or funeral basket, made from both traditional, local materials and non-native materials, using traditional techniques. It is coiled to the left, and utilizes willow and bracken root fern. Like many baskets of the region, this basket has been adorned with beadwork. Traditionally the beads would be made from olivella shell disks. However, it was not uncommon to see European glass beads on these baskets, as is the case with this month’s Close-Up. These beads were typical of trade in the 1860s. These beads were sewn on with a single stitch of split willow. With the exception of a few red ones, the beads are white, which gives them a more traditional appearance. According to Christopher Moser in his Native American Basketry of Central California, this basket was originally decorated with Mallard Duck feathers and red Woodpecker scalps between the rim and first row of beadwork.

Because of its history, the basket offers researchers an opportunity to better understand early California, including the ways that the Missions impacted traditional domestic practices and the made-for-sale basketry trade. It also provides us a chance to better understand the role of indigenous women and their work in native life, both prior, during and post-Mission era. And while many may think that basketry is a relic of the past, it is also still very much a living, vibrant practice carried out by today’s Native communities throughout the state and the country. This basket serves as a wonderful connection between the present and past, and is an invaluable reminder of the culture and history contained within it.

Guest Author Maggie Hames was a 2018 SCMNH Collections Intern with a focus on digitization California basketry. Her original post has been updated by Collections Manager Kathleen Aston.

June 2018: Celebrating the Magic of Summer

Summer, like no other time, is the season we most associate with being outside.

For the Central Coast, summer may not always be the warmest part of the year. But with its long days, school breaks and family vacations, summer typically affords us more time than any other to recreate, travel to new places or our favorite spots, and discover new things about the natural world.

The Museum will once again be a destination for all ages this summer as we ramp up new exhibits, public programming and, of course, summer camps. It all starts June 1, when we premiere the first of three Summer Art Series exhibitions and free First Friday receptions. We kick it off with Margaret Niven, an accomplished Tannery Arts Center artist whose show, Trees of Coastal California, will deepen our appreciation for the beauty and diversity of the trees around us. Shows in July and August will feature Diana Walsworth and Linda Cover, respectively, whose shows are titled Brink-The Art of Conservation and Nature in the Round and Square. Each of our First Friday receptions is open to the public from 5-7 p.m.

On June 23, we will officially welcome summer with the free, family-friendly Summer Kick-Off Festival, both inside the Museum and outside in Tyrrell Park. The full-day festival will feature kids’ music, food trucks, science-based games and live animals. New this year, we also welcome several partnering organizations, such as the Museum of Art & History, Museum of Discovery, and Watsonville Wetlands Watch, to name just a few.

Lastly, in July and August, the hustle and bustle of school-year classroom visits will be replaced with the exciting energy of our summer camps for kids in grades K-5. Participants in the “Art and Science of Nature” camps will experience outdoor investigations and hands-on art projects, while the “Biomimicry Camp” will draw inspiration from nature to solve design challenges and generate ideas for a more sustainable life on earth. Both camps offer exciting field trips. Our third camp, “Can You Dig It?” will offer campers the opportunity to become junior paleontologists, geologists, and biologists as they dig into the world of fossils, bones, rocks, and dirt. “Can You Dig It?” is sold out but there is still time to apply to the other camps. And scholarships are available for qualifying families.

We hope you will join us this summer for these and other engaging opportunities to explore the wonders of nature.

See you soon at the Museum,

Heather Moffat McCoy
Executive Director

Joanne Curby: Seabright Neighborhood Liaison

Joanne Curby is a familiar face around our beloved Seabright neighborhood. She is our liaison with the Seabright Neighborhood Association, which is a co-sponsor of the June 23rd Summer Kick-Off Festival.

Joanne, who is a member of the Museum’s Pat & Kirk Smith Club, is a key link between the Museum and residents who live in the charming homes surrounding our historic building and adjacent Tyrrell Park.

“The Museum is the gem of our neighborhood—a place you can come to both enjoy and take something away,” Joanne said. “When you come though the doors of this place, you will learn something or see something very interesting, and sometimes even astonishing.”

Joanne is fond of Albert Einstein’s quote: “Look deep into nature and then you will understand everything better.”

A Seabrightan since 1991, Joanne retired in 2007 from a 27-year career serving the City of Santa Cruz Parks and Recreation Department at the Louden Nelson Community Center, where she enjoyed maintaining the facility and spending time with seniors, veterans and other frequent visitors to the center.

Joanne enjoys taking care of summer homes for neighbors and looking in on older friends. An open-water swimmer, Joanne also is a member of the Swimming Masters Program at UC Santa Cruz and she climbs at Seabright’s Pacific Edge, which like the Neighborhood Association is a Member of the Museum’s Business Partnership Program.

Thank you for all your support, Joanne!

May 2018: Protecting Endangered Species

California condor — U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service

When we talk about engaging in stewardship of the natural world, we might be tempted to think of nature as it exists today. But the one sure thing about nature is that it is always changing—adapting to its own forces as well as those contributed by human factors. For many, the defining motivation behind stewardship is the desire to act in the present to positively impact the future—thinking about how actions we take now can improve conditions in nature.

As our natural resources respond—positively and negatively—to our actions, we must wonder what “nature” will look like to future generations who have never had the chance to see the Great Barrier Reef, an old-growth redwood forest, or a flock of snowy plovers. Will we be able to preserve critical species and habitats, and with what tools and resources? What role can we play individually to preserve something that is meaningful to us?

On May 17, the Museum will host the next installment of our bi-annual Rio Theatre Speaker Series with a panel discussing “Tales from the Brink: Recovering Endangered Species in California.” Moderated by California’s Secretary of Natural Resources John Laird, the presentation will feature status updates by three scientific experts on the California Condor, Southern Sea Otter and Salmonids—all currently listed under the Endangered Species Act.

The panel will explore how everyone from policymakers, researchers and individual community scientists on the Central Coast has a part in pulling these populations back from the brink of extinction. Secretary Laird, a former Assemblymember and Santa Cruz mayor, will provide a larger context about the status of species protection in California. I hope you will join us for what promises to be an engaging, informative program.

In addition to the Rio Theatre talk, I also hope you will visit us at the Museum for one or more of our other upcoming events, including our May 4 First Friday free science illustration demonstrations featuring exhibitors from The Art of Nature and our May 12 workshop “Seeds of Knowledge” highlighting strategies for habitat plant restoration and field sketching.

As always, we look forward to seeing you at the Museum, and appreciate your support.

Thank you,

Heather Moffat McCoy
Executive Director

May 2018: Paleobotany

Spring is coming along nicely at the Museum. We’re super excited about our blooming garden and growing programs related to native plants. For May’s Collection Close-Up, we have arranged a tour of our fossil plant garden. Rather than heading outside, this garden tour will take us into the paleobotany shelves of our paleontology cabinets.

Paleobotany, or fossil plants, is an interdisciplinary field relying on both botanical and geological expertise to investigate questions related to the evolution and natural history of plants. By studying fossil plant material, paleobotanists learn about the ancient organism and also delve into questions such as whether the specimen has close living relatives, how the fossil’s anatomy compares to that of modern plants, what the specimen can tell us about the relationship of different layers of rock and what the specimen can tell us about the the environmental conditions in which it lived.

Not all plant material is resilient enough to be preserved; often it decays or is consumed before it can be buried (and be on its way to fossilization). As a result, plant fossils typically consist of parts of the plant — most commonly, individual leaves or stem pieces. They are also often preserved as imprints of the original specimen in the rock which holds them instead of preserved material itself. There is still surprisingly a lot of information you can gleam from incomplete fossil plants — from size and shape of the fossil to specific structures, such as veins, thorns and even individual cells under the right magnification.

Here are some of the beautiful specimens from our fossil garden and the stories they tell:

Cordia leaf (Monterey Formation, Miocene epoch). Leaf fossils are the most common macroscopic remains of plants. With its clear leaf shape and veins, this specimen can be identified as a member of the Cordia genus.

Stem (Monterey Formation, Miocene epoch). This impression of a stem was found by a Soquel High student in the 1970s. If you look at it closely, you can see the impressions of the plant’s thorns, which are identified in this image by white arrows.

Fossilized Annularia leaf — *Annularia* leaf

Annularia leaf (Francis Creek Shale, Pennsylvanian epoch). This distinctive whorl of leaflets along a stem belongs to a member of the extinct Calamites family, a tree-like relative of modern horsetail plants. This specimen is one of several in our collection (like the one below) from the Francis Creek Shale, a famous fossil locality known for its unusual preservation of soft-tissued organisms within rounded nodules of rock.

Fern leaf (Francis Creek Shale, Pennsylvanian epoch). This beautiful impression of a fern is another great example from the Francis Creek Shale. Both fossil ferns and sphenopsids (like Annularia above) are commonly found within the rock formation, as are a wide variety of uniquely preserved land and marine fauna.

For a closer look at these fossils, as well as other exhibits and gardens, stop by the Museum through June to look our Collections Close-Up.