We’re just starting our brief, but critical campaign to protect wildlife and wild places for all eastern Iowans. For the next two weeks, we will share the value of our local natural spaces and ways you can further our mission everyday. There will also be some fun giveaways, so follow along with us online for …
Are you fostering Bur Oak pawpaws? Listen up! We are hosting a Pawpaw Roundup Oct. 4-8 to collect all pawpaw plants for the winter. From 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. that week, individuals can drop-off plants at the Bur Oak office: 5 Sturgis Corner Drive, Suite 1250, in Iowa City. Next spring, we will invite everyone out for Pawpaw …
Fall campaign countdown After making the decision to cancel our in-person fall fundraiser, Brunch with Bur Oak, we’ve got something else up our sleeve. In mid-October, we will launch A Force for Nature, our virtual fall campaign and we’re hoping you’ll join us! Local natural spaces are critical. Everyone — adults and children — can …
By 1837, Catlin had assembled his portable Indian museum and began taking it around to eastern cities. It was offered as a stage show, with Catlin onstage telling tribal stories and his adventures among them, and placing his painted portraits and scenes on easels as they appeared in the story, supplemented by the artifacts which …
Our last three notes regarding cabinets of curiosities, professional collections and museums mostly had a Euro-centric perspective. Today, let us review a uniquely American museum, in which much of the action unfolded right here in the Midwest. George Catlin was born in 1796, and grew up on a farm in New York state. As a …
George Catlin’s Travelling Museum – His Field Study Read More »
No sketch about museums and species would be complete without including Walter Rothschild. Born into the extremely wealthy banking family of Britain in 1868, he lived all his life at Tring Park, the family estate near London. We know a lot about him because his niece Miriam Rothschild knew him well and wrote his biography …
The cabinets of curiosities of the 1600s and 1700s, scattered across Europe, raised some good questions about the life and the geology of our planet. But they were too limited to provide good answers. By the 1800s certain oceanic trade routes were well-established, and Britain especially regularly sent out mapping expeditions the primary assignment to …
Once upon a time, some 80 million years ago, the center of the continent we now call North America was a shallow seaway. Its waters were relatively warm, and algae and other plants were busy extracting large amounts of calcium from the water. Combined with carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, this sea was loaded with …
The native shrub called bladdernut apparently used to be quite common around here based on reference to it in early literature. But a couple of decades ago, when I went looking for it in what should have been its favorite haunts, I couldn’t find any. Finally, I asked Jeff Schabilion, professor of botany, who grew …
In 1952, British author Daphne du Maurier released a macabre story titled, “The Birds.” The tale was about ordinary birds collectively abandoning their traditional role in nature and shifting their focus to killing off humans. And humans were quite unprepared for this assault in spite of their supposedly superior intellect and aggressive weapons. Book reviewers …