Collections Close-Up - Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History

Collections Close-Up: In Touch with Touch Pools

Since long before Laura Hecox hauled her petticoats across the rocky and rich worlds of West Cliff’s tide pools, the natural wonders of Monterey Bay have captivated all who encounter them. Pounded by the mighty surf and subject to the extremities of the changing tides, the plants and animals of the intertidal zone are especially intriguing. Efforts to get closer to these and other creatures held within the depths of the ocean gave rise to the modern practice of holding marine life in aquariums. This month we explore our interactive side by examining a special form of this phenomenon: the museum’s touch pool.

Museum staff in 1977 stand around the then new touch pool exhibit. — First touch pool with Charles Prentiss, Nikki Silva and John Anderson

To the outpouring of public delight, what was then the Santa Cruz City Museum poured gallons upon gallons of seawater into our first touch pool in 1977. Curator Charles Prentiss designed this pool, which was built with the assistance of Museum friends and local companies. It consisted of a circular fiberglass tub, collared by redwood boards. An educational structure from the start, the edges of the pool were inscribed with labels describing the life teaming within. A particular fan favorite, featured often in local news articles, was any kind of sea star.

Early on, the Museum hosted classes on marine life in tidepools and the broader ocean, both at this interior pool and along the local coast. Touchpools have long offered direct and accessible engagement with seldom-seen creatures from another world. From the outset, gentle engagements with the animals have been a must, as the modern use of aquaria and touchpools emphasize their function as tools for the empathy and conservation of wildlife – an especially tricky task for animals that aren’t typically seen as charismatic as big cats and beautiful birds, like prickly urchins and slimy sea slugs.

A black and white image of a girl holding up a sea star from a 1977 Sentinel article. — *Sentinel* article, 1977

The Museum’s original touchpool was brought into being during a boom in local marine science and conservation construction. The Monterey Bay Aquarium Foundation formed in 1978, and successfully opened a world class aquarium showcasing the bay’s unique marine environment in 1984. UCSC’s Long Marine Lab was first opened in 1978, a research lab with early public facing components that ultimately developed into today’s incredible Seymour Marine Discovery Center.

The initial boom in the popularity of aquaria was driven by a sense of wonder, though with a greater focus on rampant collection rather than empathy and conservation. The first burst of aquarium popularity was inspired in the 1850s by Englishman Phillip Henry Gosses’s books on aquarium construction, specimen collection, and observation. Packed with stunning illustrations and spell binding descriptions, the coastal collecting mania Gosse’s work inspired overtook middle class Victorian fern fever and bolstered support for the creation of large public aquariums. Long before the institutions above created their own aquaria, a fascination for the “natural aquariums” of Seabright led local residents to bring bathtubs to the beach and fill them with tide pool creatures in the late 1800s. In her Reminiscences of Seabright, Elizabeth Forbes notes that despite the community’s best caretaking efforts, the creatures were unhappy, and they were returned to the sea before too long.

Today’s Seabright touch pool depends upon special permits and CA Fish and Wildlife Department regulations for the collection, care, and use of specific marine plants and animals. Rebuilt in 2016, the current pool provides enhanced physical accessibility through the use of low-slung walls and clear sides, while portraying a more realistic sense of the tidepool with its rocky border aesthetic. Housed within the SC Naturalist Exhibit, the pool pays homage to the life of our foundational collector Laura Hecox, whose story of being an untrained female nature observer at the turn of the 20th century illustrates how anyone, regardless of formal credentials, can be a naturalist.

Former museum director Heather Moffat McCoy stands by the old tide pool exhibit in 2016 as she makes plans for designing a new one. — Heather Moffat McCoy, former director, makes plans for a new pool in 2016

In 2020, we’re still appreciating algae and asking naturalists how best to start tidepooling – but we’re doing so at safe distances or masked. In the same way, Covid19 has implications for the care of our living collections. In general, the pandemic has been difficult for zoos and aquariums whose obligations to care for their animals and plants do not get any cheaper even as they lose funding from admission prices. The lack of admissions also means that animals are becoming shy of human guests – losing a level of comfort that is important for the well-being of the animals and the success of the exhibit.

While our living collections are small in scale compared to other institutions, they still take special consideration – like making sure we have lights on timers to extend the “daylight” our touch pool residents would have experienced during normal open hours. A return to open hours presents its own new problems – how might the delicate balance of water chemistry be changed by an influx of extra hand sanitizer?

For more about the nuts and bolts of what it takes to keep our touch pool running, in both ordinary and extraordinary times, as well as the educational and ethical dimensions of working with these plants and animals in our upcoming event, Tidepools and Touch: Care for Living Collections.

The intertidal touch pool exhibit seen from above as it appears today. — The intertidal touch pool remodel in 2016

Collections Close-Up: Tide Pools and Touch

Take the plunge into the interactive world of our intertidal touch pool exhibit, which has provided visitors with an intimate look at the interior world of the sea outside our doors for decades.

Museum staff explore the history of these hands-on exhibits, from beachside Victorian tubs to today’s collecting permits. We further investigate the care of these seaworthy collections, including the practical challenges of creating intertidal conditions, and their special capacity to connect people to nature.

Resources

Collections Close-Up blog, In Touch with Tide Pools
More on the history of the Victorian Pioneers of Aquaria
Phillip Henry Gosse’s “The Aquarium: An Unveiling of the Wonders of the Deep Sea”
Tide Chart for the Santa Cruz-Monterey Bay area
Aquarium advice forum for hobbyists
Snapshot Cal Coast December 2020 project
Tidepooling Tips from Hilltromper

About the series: Zoom into the stories, secrets, and science of our collections during monthly webinars with Collections Manager Kathleen Aston. This live event is an extension of our monthly Collections Close-Up blog, with added insights and intrigue. Members are invited to participate in this program before it is made available to the general public as well as ask questions directly of Kathleen.

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Collections Close-Up: The Interwoven History of Baskets and Museums

Spend an evening unraveling the complex ways in which consumer trends and museums influenced early 20th basketry collections and craft. Collections Manager Kathleen Aston will elaborate on these trends and how they relate to our collection. Joining us will be Julie Sidel, Interpreter 1 for Santa Cruz Mission State Historic Park, to share how the intersection of museum artifacts and interpretation illuminates daily life at the Santa Cruz Mission.

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Collections Close-Up: Making Sense of Made-for-Sale

Walking down the collection’s basketry aisle, drinking in the breathtaking variety of shape, texture, and technique, a glint might catch your eye. Amongst the warm sheen of stripped willow shoot or the bright yellow of dyed porcupine quill, you might catch the unmistakable sparkle of glass. It might surprise you to find such a material on the basketry shelves. Last month we talked about how the spooky or the scary can spark learning opportunities, here at SCMNH we also seek to unpack surprises. Following that course, this month we will be digging deeper into one of the wonders of our basketry collections: a “made for sale” basket.

Following this sparkling glass to its source, you would find a bottle-shaped basket, twined in warm browns and light yellows. The red-brown was likely from tule root, the yellow from tule or cattail leaves, and the black accent, dyed tule. The alternating stripes of color end in an attached coaster-like platform. Taking a closer look, you would discover that the shape arises from the glass bottle it overlays. The basket was collected in Northern California and is attributed to the Klamath River tribes. Today’s federally recognized Klamath River tribes are composed of the Klamaths, Modoc and Yahooskin, distinct peoples whose basketry traditions have similarities.

The absence of specific information about the basket’s weaver is contrasted by our knowledge of the collector. Maude Silvey was already a longtime resident of Santa Cruz by 1970, when she donated her personal collection of more than one hundred baskets to the great joy of museum staff and community. News articles of the time reflect the extent of her interest in baskets, where we learn that “Mrs. Silvey had visited northern California Indian tribes to observe weaving techniques and to obtain baskets for the collection.”

Glass bottle wrapped in basketry, made by the Klamath River Tribes

Her story unfolds against the broader backdrop of collecting trends at the time. Born in the 1880s, Maude Silvey’s early years coincided with the raging temperature of America’s “canastromania” or basket fever. Coined in 1904 by Smithsonian curator Otis Mason, this frenzied collection of baskets swept American culture from about 1890 to 1920. It was spurred by several factors; from the leisure time of an emerging middle class that was being lured west by railroads to the notion that baskets were primitive but pristine objects made by a doomed race that needed to be salvaged. (For an incredible discussion of these interwoven complexities, check out Basket Weavers for the California Curio Trade, a book exploring the lives of Elizabeth and Louise Hickox, weavers from the Klamath River area).

Many well-known collections of California basketry were developed around this time, including that of the Hearst Museum of Anthropology. It was their Lawrence Dawson who helped identify and describe baskets in our own collection in the late seventies. A significant percentage of which were described as “made for sale”.

It seems like a straightforward term at first, applied to baskets made for commercial consumption, like the ones collected on Mrs. Silvey’s trip. Probing the meaning of this category, we might ask how such trips were planned, how the weavers were compensated, and how they emphasized traditional techniques or innovated with them. Early 20th century museums tended to deliberately obscure these kinds of commercial exchanges in their interpretations or avoid displaying baskets that diverged from anthropological understandings of tradition, treating indigenous weavers as if they were confined to the past rather than living craftspersons.

In examining these aspects of our collection, we find that our “made for sale” baskets fit two main types. Some baskets take traditional (a complex term itself, which we might also phrase as “in the style of objects made pre-contact”) forms and functions, and appear to have been sold to collectors unused. An example of these is a cooking basket with neither food residue nor burns from cooking stones.

The other type, which includes the bottle baskets, have forms or functions that are innovations from tradition. Traditional water carrying baskets in California Indian basketry would have relied on watertight weaving and some kind of sealant, rather than a glass center. Other baskets in our collection that follow this type include a tiered hanging shelf, a wall hanging plaque with a holding pouch, and others.

As National Native American Heritage Month, November is an opportunity for institutions to pay deliberate attention to the history and continuing culture of America’s indigenous peoples. Unpacking the words we use to describe the objects in our collections, especially across cultural differences and within the context of colonialism, is a critical component of good stewardship. To delve further into our basketry collections and the forces that shape them, check out this month’s Collections Close Up event on November 12th.

Collections Close-Up: Storytelling with Skulls

This month’s Collections Close Up stares out at us from the intersection of spooky, stunning, and scientific – of storytelling with skulls. To set the scene, we introduce a newer member of the Museum’s collection – the skull of a turkey vulture (Cathartes aura), part of a complete skeleton given to the museum from the collection of Ray Bandar.

These birds are no stranger to Halloween-esque themes – carrion eaters like turkey vultures feed on the decaying flesh of dead animals. While this is exactly as spooky as it sounds, it’s also an essential ecological role. By consuming dead animals, turkey vultures and other carrion eaters help reduce the amount of disease in the ecosystem.

It’s also this very behavior that has inspired the term vulture culture – an evolving subculture of people who are captivated by the artistic allure of body parts of dead animals. Of course, there’s more to a skull then how nicely it would cover part of your wall. From a science education perspective, skulls tell stories of the adaptations that animals use to survive in the world around them. For example, here we note a strong, sharp beak for tearing meat from bones rather than sipping nectar from flowers or straining food from water. Researchers dig deeper into the morphology, or structures of skulls, looking at hundreds of individuals bones to build our understanding of animals’ lives.

Collector Ray Bandar, was no stranger to balancing a morbid fascination of skeletons with their scientific and educational value. So driven by his passion to study nature’s “sculptures”, the humble Bay Area high school teacher spent 60 years as a field associate for the California Academy of Sciences (CAS). While his collection contained everything from birds to bears, his particular speciality was marine mammal skulls. Working in collaboration with Academy scientists and the West Coast Marine Mammal Stranding Network efforts, Bandar spent decades oncall for collecting trips from Bodega Bay to Año Nuevo.

*Ray Bandar in his home, photo by Ross Feighery*

Day or night, whenever the calls came, the first part of the process for deceased animals was also the most important: collecting the data. Information such as the location, species, sex, size, apparent cause of death are critical for a specimen’s contribution to science. He would often participate in the entire messy, squishy and smelly process of taking these animals from “From Death to Display”.

Skulls are collected because they are information-rich – scientists can learn a lot from the wear on the teeth to the size of the brain case and more. They are also expedient – it is easier to store the skull of a whale than an entire individual. Nonetheless, in rare or scientifically valuable cases, like Orca O319 – scientists may take the whole animal.

Whether whole or in pieces, Bandar contributed thousands of specimens to Cal Academy’s collections, particularly California sea lion skulls. Collected under CAS permits, many of the specimens were stored in his home, or “Bone Palace”. A stunning take on the palatial, specimen rich displays of natural history collections throughout time, Bandar’s labor of love inspired numerous articles and even a documentary or two.

Never the shy collector, Ray was also a constant public fixture at the Academy. He designed exhibits, wrote labels and staffed events, particularly around Halloween. Today, elements of his collection are still on display, supporting the CAS’s stories of skulls.

After Ray’s death in 2017, well documented members of his skeletal menagerie were relocated to Academy collections storage. The folks at the Academy generously shared the remaining wealth of Bandar’s kingdom with science education organizations – including your local natural history museum. Thrilled to take part in the rich legacy of “Bones” Bandar, Museum staff collaborated to select a set of specimens to flesh out the gaps in our collection, focusing on enhancing our capacity to engage visitors with the striking elements of the natural world.

And that has been the case for this turkey vulture skull – whose first public debut was as a creepy carrion eater with an ecological heart of gold for 2019’s “The Birds” themed Museum of the Macabre. Other Bandar specimens, including a second turkey vulture skull, showcased biodiversity – enriching our “exploded bird” exhibit case.

Macabre has traditionally been our evening of curiosities, creatures, and cocktails – where we dig into the seemingly strange or ostensibly awful elements of the natural world to create space for different kinds of connections. Join us this year for online events, whether for creepy caves, macabre mushrooms, taxidermy tips or a deeper dive into cabinets of curiosities and their relationship to modern museums.

Collections Close-Up: Curiosity Cabinets

Peer into the wonderful world of wunderkammers — otherwise known as curiosity cabinets. Often filling full rooms, these pre-modern museums favored the eccentric and the esoteric. We’ll explore how our museum’s history is rooted in the Victorian versions of the curious trend, as well as more contemporary takes on cabinets.

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Collections Close-Up: Santa Cruz Fossils and the People Who Dig ‘Em

Frank Perry works on a cast of a fossil sea cow skeleton.

Dig into the fossil record of Santa Cruz through the eyes of locals who find themselves captivated by these windows into the past and who made it their work to share this passion with others. One of these important contributors, Wayne Thompson, will share his history with the Museum and the unique potential that fossils have to engage students with science and the natural world, inspiring the next generation of environmental stewards.

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Collections Close-Up: Digging Into Learning

Fossils tell the changing story of life on earth over millennia – but they can also tell stories of more recent changes. For this month’s Collections Close-Up, we look at an ancient specimen and its deep timeline, as well as a more modern, local legacy of integrating paleontological adventures with educating young minds.

The above fragment of a leaf-imprinted shale is a small slice of the Monterey Formation, an olive-gray to light-gray layer of shale and mudstone that underlies swaths of the Santa Cruz area. This formation, rich in once-organic material, was formed during the Miocene. Defined as the period of time between 5.33 and 23.03 million years ago, the Miocene was a period of great change for earth’s ecosystems. The earth’s ecosystems became cooler and drier, and animals like horses began to look more like they do today. And while there is much to explore in the world of Miocene mammals, this period also saw the first emergence of kelp forests and grasslands.

As distant as it may seem, you can explore the way the Miocene shapes present day places such as the Monterey Formation mudstone of Ano Nuevo Point or the ancient ocean beds that are today’s unique Santa Cruz Sandhills. Exploring these landscapes is a great way to observe stories of ancient life. In some places it is also possible to collect elements of these stories, as long as you maintain a responsible collecting ethic: research and follow the local laws, and consider the specific concerns of paleontology ethics.

This month’s feature was given to the Museum in 1974, where it is preserved alongside several similar specimens collected by high school students, who were led in their own exploration of ancient local life by teacher William Miller. Bill, as he was also called, was an earth sciences instructor with an active local presence in organizations like the Museum Commission, the Boy Scouts, and the Gem and Mineral Society. His passion for promoting public understanding of science made him a common feature in the local papers in the 1970s, speaking about fossil whale finds and similar spectacular local fossils.

Newspaper article with headline Fossilized Whale Skulls Found

Miller’s former students have fond memories of his classes, including his classroom’s improvised paleontology lab and how it helped them wrap their head around the history of the earth. But he was also a big believer in teaching beyond the classroom. Miller organized frequent field trips across the Santa Cruz County landscape for his students to learn firsthand about geology, paleontology, and even litter.

Newspaper article with headline Students get some practical knowledge about litterbugs.

Oftentimes it is the eye catching creatures, like the whales and sea cows of ancient Santa Cruz oceans that capture our attention more than the subtle beauty of a delicate leaf impression. Another educator who has long been involved with the museum can speak to that as well – Wayne Thompson is a local middle school teacher, and paleontologist who helped prepare our stunning mastodon skull for exhibit in the early 1980s. His interests in science were encouraged by his education, and in particular, his teacher Bill Miller. Today, Wayne carries forward this legacy of connecting kids to science through paleontology – brimming with contagious excitement, he’s always happy to help the Museum, and always looking for ways to get his students involved in his paleontology projects.

He’s particularly keen to explore how new tools, like virtual field trips and 3D scanning technologies, can get folks excited about fossils and other topics. Now that health precautions have moved many schools into virtual mode, the enthusiasm of teachers like Wayne for experiencing new tools is even more critical. To dig deeper into what we can learn from the Museum’s fossils, and to explore how one of our county’s teachers is meeting the challenges of virtual education in uncertain times, check out this month’s Collections Close-Up event.

Explore geology and paleontology with items from our Online Museum Store.

Learn more about geology with our Rockin' Pop Up programs.

Collections Close-Up: Preserving Our Past

The Museum opened its doors to the public 115 years ago this month, and though the doors have changed over time, the task of stewarding our collections has always been an inherent part of our mission. Explore the journey of our collections over the past century and gain a deeper understanding of what preservation looks like today.

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Collections Close-Up: Collecting Spaces

One hundred and fifteen years ago this month, the Santa Cruz Museum first opened its doors to the public. Those doors were not the ones that visitors might walk through today. Indeed, the museum has had several homes in its evolution from the city’s first public museum to our present form as the Santa Cruz Museum of Natural History. As we continue to provide activities and inspiration for connecting with the natural world in this moment of physical distancing, this month’s Collections Close-Up looks at how the migration of our spaces influences our evolving collections.

A familiar foundation to our story is Laura Hecox, whose lighthouse museum provided the first home to what would become our collections. In 1869, Santa Cruz’s first lighthouse was built near the site of todays’ Mark Abbott Memorial lighthouse. Laura Hecox, having taken up the post of keeper after her father Adna passed away in 1883, made her collection available to the public as part of her regular lighthouse tours. Tall wooden shelves were packed full of carefully cataloged fossils, shells, birds, curios, and artifacts, which photographs from the 1880s depict as full to bursting. Her collection was a popular and respected local attraction and, in the early 1900s, was solicited for exhibition at Santa Cruz’s first library.

On April 14, 1904, the main branch of Santa Cruz’s public library opened to the public. The two story building housed more than 14,000 books on its first floor, with ample space to expand into its lower level. Plans for this space were already underway, and not just for books – on April 13, 1904, Laura Hecox had already deeded a portion of her collection to make this space a public museum. Her friend, local luminary Dr. Charles Anderson, was quoted in a contemporary newspaper praising the combined virtue of libraries and museums in providing both explanations and examples for public knowledge.

The museum opened to popular acclaim on August 21, 1905. While Laura’s collection seeded the museum, we know that from the beginning her collection was already being expanded. Laura made sure to acknowledge friends of the library who gave additional items for the opening, from a centipede collected in Arizona to Chilean coins. Despite this variety, the collection is usually described as one of natural history, and the library noted that they generated increased demand for books on natural history. This success of the museum as an educational endeavor would influence its next home.

Santa Cruz’s first dedicated high school building opened in 1897, but tragically burned down in 1913. Fortunately, the Museum was relocated to the high school after it was rebuilt in 1915. This was likely motivated by the need for space, but a place of learning seemed the right home for the collections. Echoing others, the Santa Cruz Evening News described the high school as “preeminently the place in Santa Cruz where numbers are engaged to study. It is therefore a place where a museum may do a great deal of good.”

Some years after Santa Cruz’s original public museum collections took on the role of a high school teaching collection, the community’s museum fervor was rekindled. In 1929 Humphrey Pilkington gave his collection of Native American artifacts and other items to Santa Cruz on the condition that a dedicated museum be established to house it. The Tyrrell Arts and Crafts House, a community hub in the park adjacent to the Seabright Library, was chosen as the Santa Cruz Museum’s new location. As curator Jed Scott and various hard working volunteers set about cataloging and organizing Pilkington’s collections, they also began to solicit other gifts to the museum. Significantly, the museum lobbied and was successful in transferring the Hecox collection from the high school to Seabright. As part of the transfer, many items that had lost labels and records while at the high school had to be re-identified.

Thus united the Hecox and Pilkington collections, along with many other invaluable donations, that remain in Seabright to the present day. In the mid 1950s they made one final, if incremental move into what was then the Seabright Library. After the library withdrew in 1965, the museum expanded into the entirety of the building, later making actual physical expansions to the rear of the building that today constitute staff offices and collections storage.

In these spaces we ground our present efforts to preserve the collections for the future. As complex as the past is that brought us here, we also have a rich history of envisioning remodels, relocations, and other possible futures for what the museum could look like. And while we never expected this virtual future, we are confident that, in the same way we have been an important feature of the Santa Cruz community for 115 years, we will continue to meet the challenges that face the community, with our community, for another 115 years and more. For a deeper dive into the intersection of our collections and space, different dreams for the Museum through time, and our current conservation efforts in our Carnegie building, register for our virtual Collections Close-Up event on August 13th.