Two chance encounters

Last week the museum of nature at Ottawa and this week the museum of wild at Tupper Lake. Two chance encounters which made a memorable pair, with both containing some really splendid exhibits, and both making some of our London museums look a little tired. This despite the first being of much the same generation as our own natural history museum.

Started the first with a photographic opportunity with some wooden mammoths. Then greeted on entry proper by a huge glass lantern erected over the original central tower, and containing a huge jellyfish (illustrated). Onto the dinosaur hall where we are reminded that dinosaurs come rather bigger in Canada than they do in England and which included a splendid reconstruction of a family group of dinosaurs which looked a bit like rhinoceri, but with a pair of horns coming out of the nose. Onto to the mammal hall with fine examples of stuffed animals, mainly large. Onto the bird hall where they were not ashamed of their fine collection of stuffed birds - not like the rather sad display at Ipswich Museum at all (see http://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/search?q=ipswich+museum). Along the way a low key but informative exhibit about the passage of the passenger pigeons. It seems that there is a chance that the presently extinct line can be resurrected by genetic jiggery-pokery and after some explanation we were invited to vote on whether this interference with Divine Providence was a good idea, with just under 10,000 voting yes and just over no. I think I was a no.

The second was fairly new and was entirely different. Inside, a modern mix of things large and small, live animals (mainly fish), stuffed animals and clever educational displays. A fine theatre where we saw a short but wide screen film about the Adirondacks. Very BBC nature program. Outside, a cunning taster of what one might see when one got out into the Adirondacks proper.

We learned various odd things  inside. For example, that you might get lots of snakes, maybe thousands, all different kinds, sharing the same handy hole for hibernation. That dead leaves were at the bottom of the food chain of mountain streams and that maple leaves were far richer in the nutrients needed to kick the food chain off than other kinds of leaves. We got to see some otters up close and personal - a first for me. Rather fishy smelling animals.

A very clever display consisting of a sphere, maybe five feet in diameter, suspended from the ceiling of its display room and illuminated by computer from the inside. You could tell the computer what to do and I asked it to do tectonic plates, upon which it displayed the evolution of our continents over the last billion years or so. I was rather surprised to learn that the present configuration is quite young, just a few million years. I associate to the rather different attempt at the same sort of thing at RAMM (see http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2013/03/ramm.html) and it would be interesting to see it again, having seen the sphere. Other options included the weather, cyclones and aeroplanes.

Outside we got up close and personal with a red tailed hawk. With an erratic boulder, in shape like a rounded pebble on Brighton beach, in size like our garage at home. There were fine views over a  marshy oxbow of the Raquette River to mountains in the middle distance. Lots of trees, mostly fairly young, most of this area having been logged out in the 19th century.

Altogether, an excellent introduction to the area. Today we will attempt the real thing.

Reference 1: http://nature.ca/en/home

Reference 2: https://www.wildcenter.org/