July 2013

Minnesota Moose

The moose, an often symbolized animal in the lore of Minnesota, has a heightened status within our state. Minnesota resorts, restaurants, coffee shops, and of course, hockey teams align their identity with this popular animal. Despite Minnesotan’s wide-spread commercial identification…


Tuesday Tweet: You’ve Got Mail

In 1902, ornithological enthusiast and photographer extraordinaire Thomas Sadler Roberts traveled to Lake Itasca, the head waters of the Mississippi River, to document and study avian life. Here he photographed Arctic Woodpeckers, Least Flycatchers, Red-eyed Vireos, Pine Warblers, Juncos, Eagles,…



Friday Flora: Touch Me Not!

I thought the name of this plant was implicit, but apparently not… Touch-Me-Nots, circa 1900 (Image taken by Thomas Sadler Roberts, part of the glass plate negative collection from the Bell Museum of Natural History records.)…


Beavers Revisited

In a letter to James Ford Bell dated September 19, 1917, in which he discussed preparations for mounted habitat groups to be installed at the Zoological Museum at the University, Dr. Thomas Sadler Roberts, Associate Curator, included a post script,…


Tuesday Tweet: You Yellow-bellied Sapsucker!

Here are a few images of a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker (no, I’m not being mean, that is really the name!) According to The Cornell Lab of Ornithology Bird Guide, Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers, “perch upright on trees, leaning on their tails like other…


Friday Fungi

Hardly a day goes by where I don’t take a lunch break to enjoy a sandwich complete with an essential ingredient: mushrooms. But on Wednesday, just two days ago, my hand-packed sandwich was sans mushrooms on a rare occurrence (for…


Friday Flora: In Living Color

Last Friday, I traveled out to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, MN. The Arboretum, part of the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Resource Sciences at the University of Minnesota, is home to over one-thousand acres of gardens and…


Complementary Collections

In yesterday’s Tuesday Tweet, I shared an image from a glass plate negative of a Black-backed Woodpecker from June of 1902. The images were from a series of negatives Thomas Sadler Roberts produced on his collecting trip to Lake Itasca…


In the field…

The past month was busy on the Exploring project, as student scanners in Digital Library Services completed over 25, 000 scans from June 10 – July 10th. This total is inclusive of the two types of scanning that have occurred…