Summer Updates!

It’s been a very busy season here at the Natick Historical Society! After the very successful series of school programs that we finished this spring, this summer has been filled with new projects. We’ve been renovating, researching and even getting in a little seasonal cleaning! This post should bring our readers up to date on some of our more recent projects and what you can look forward to seeing the next time you visit our museum.

The Natick Historical Society- Now with More Room! 

One of the biggest changes you might notice when visiting the Natick Historical Society museum is that we have rearranged our gallery space. The large exhibit case that previously dominated the entrance to the galleries has been removed. This gives us significantly more space for public programs, school groups and other functions.  The exhibit
it previously housed, “Project Passenger Pigeon” has temporarily flown the coop, so to speak.  However, a new exhibit, focusing on our passenger pigeon specimen, conservation and the history of birds in America will be opening this fall at the Morse Institute Library in Natick Center.

Our bird specimens, patiently waiting to be cleaned 

An especially exciting change has been the redesign of our Birds of America case. The Natick Historical Society has a rather large collection of taxidermy mounts of birds, dating from our early history as a historical and natural history society. Many of these birds are now over a hundred years old and are just as much historic artifacts as they are scientific specimens. Our newly redone case has been painted, cleaned and had new lights installed to really show of the brilliancy of some of our birds plumage. The birds have been carefully cleaned so that they can show of their bright colors and plumage. The bird specimens were originally preserved using arsenic, which in the late 1800’s was not an uncommon practice. This makes interacting with these pieces for long periods of time somewhat dangerous, so our conservation and cleaning of the birds had to be a very careful process.  The birds have now been thoroughly primped and cleaned and are back in their case looking better than ever. We’ve printed new labels for all of the birds and reorganized them within the case so that this unique part of our collection can be highlighted to the extent it deserves.

Finches, warblers, buntings  and more from out new Birds of the Americas case

A Golden Olive Woodpecker, previously called a Guyana Woodpecker, after being cleaned 

One particularly interesting part of this case re-installation was researching the new labels for each of our specimens. Many of the scientific and common names for our birds have changed since 1880. A number of the birds were labeled using the names found in James Audubon’s The Birds of America, which are no longer in use in the scientific community.  Discovering the exact identities of many of our birds proved to be quite the challenge! But, with a good deal of research and some help from our friends at the Broadmoor Audubon Wildlife sanctuary, we have been able to successfully identify all of our birds. To learn more about the early history of the society and some of our bird specimens you can read previous blog entries here.

The next exhibit change that is already underway is our new hallway exhibit. This exhibit, titled “Our Story” will be making its debut this fall. This exhibit will feature several items from our collection and will tell the history of the Natick Historical society as well our building, the Bacon Free Library. Exhibit construction is already underway and we are excited to be able to share the history of our museum with as many people as possible.

We have a very busy fall planned here at the Historical Society, with events every month and several other new exhibits in the works. Be sure to check our Facebook page for updates as they develop and we hope to see you this fall!

Project Passenger Pigeon

NHS' very own Passenger Pigeon specimen, collected and mounted by A.L. Babcock.
Photographed by our Curator Kate Herron.

Birds again you say? Hold that thought! We will continue with our normally scheduled program in the next post, but first, let's pause to consider the famed Passenger Pigeon, its extinction, and what that means for us today.

Did you know that, thanks to our friend A.L. Babcock, the Natick Historical Society has a rare Passenger Pigeon specimen? And did you know that 2014 is being celebrated as "The Year of the Passenger Pigeon?" 2014 marks 100 years since the last known Passenger Pigeon specimen died. Her name (yes, she had a name!) was Martha and her life was documented by a scientist at the University of Chicago as well as the Cincinnati Zoo where she died of "old age" on September 1, 1914 (you can read more about Martha here). How strange indeed to live in a time when we can note the exact time and day an entire species became extinct, find overwhelming evidence of the decline in the historical record, and yet end up with such a result?!

This anniversary provides a critical moment to consider how we today can lead more sustainable lives because, after all, our lifestyles directly affect the animals and habitats we live with and, as the young boy in the video below notes so clearly, "if there is no nature, there is no us."

PICTURE THIS: Passenger Pigeons once lived here in such abundance that one particular flock was noted in southern Ontario, Canada during the 1860s as having been, "1 mi (1.5 km) wide and 300 mi (500 km) long, took 14 hours to pass, and held in excess of 3.5 billion birds." Naturalist Joel Greenberg has written an intriguing book entitled, "A Feathered River Across the Sky," which traces the bird's history, explores how such a common creature could be wiped from the face of the earth so quickly, and the repercussions of this man-made extinction. He's also involved in the making of this upcoming documentary:

From Billions to None: The Passenger Pigeon's Flight to Extinction from David Mrazek on Vimeo.

So just how did these ubiquitous birds become extinct you ask? The short answer is that it all started with deforestation by European settlers in North America, slowly destroying the bird's natural habitat (a problem that persists today and continues to affect animal populations of all kinds). By the late 1800s, the birds were being hunted on an enormous scale as a source of cheap meat (if you are interested in the often strange, fervid, and various ways these birds were hunted, read the third paragraph of this Stanford essay here). When scientists realized how much the Passenger Pigeon population had diminished, it was too late to save them since they only reproduced within large colonies.

It's interesting to note that today, de-extinction efforts are actually underway. As we consider our own Passenger Pigeon here in Natick, what questions must we ask of our own behavior towards nature? How can we make such efforts unnecessary and safeguard our neighborhood, indeed the world, for ourselves, our children, and future generations?