Helen FieldsScience Writer

Remember the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef? It’s an ongoing project – they’ll keep mounting exhibits of parts of it in different places. Right now there’s a show in Pasadena. But I heard good news recently about the Smithsonian Community Reef, the part that I contributed to. It’s going on display at the Putnam Museum in Davenport, Iowa, and will stay up for five years. (So there’s plenty of time to plan your vacation to Eastern Iowa.) Read about it here.

The other day, my boyfriend and I were very amused by the billboards we saw along the road into Pittsburgh. “RAPTORS!” proclaimed one. “PENGUINS!” said another. These billboards were advertising the National Aviary, which happened to be near our hotel, so we dropped by the next morning.

An aviary, if you’re not familiar with the term, is like a zoo for birds. The National Aviary has about 150 species of birds. There was also the occasional mammal – I spotted a mouse in one cage (ok, that was not part of the display) and a sloth in another (pretty sure that was intentional), but otherwise, it’s all birds. A few are in individual cages. The bald eagle and Steller’s sea eagle each gets its own spot, open to the sky. Most are grouped together in larger habitats, like a tropical rainforest and a grassland.

One of our first stops was feeding time at the lorikeet cage. Lorikeets are noisy little parrots that like nectar. At feeding time, you can buy a little cup for $3. Or you can let someone else do it and take pictures of them:

One of my favorite birds was this one, which wanders around the rainforest room. Shortly before I took this picture, it flew up to a branch where a bunch of ibises were making an awful racket, sidled up to them, and made this pose:

It worked – they shut up and flew away. But the most remarkable thing about this bird is that it’s a Victoria crowned pigeon, native to New Guinea. The pigeons most of us know the best are filthy-looking birds that walk around in cities, but really the pigeons and doves make up quite a lovely and diverse group. There are hundreds of species. Many have beautiful colors. This one has crazy head-feathers and is the size of a chicken. It’s not the pigeons’ fault someone domesticated them and let them take over the world’s cities. And I must admit, I like the city ones, too. They’re funny.

The wetlands display included quite a few flamingos:

Fun fact: Flamingos get their color from their diet. In the wild, they eat pink food and extract it that way, but in captivity, they’re normally fed some kind of color supplement.

I found the whole aviary experience delightful. We were there on a weekday, which meant it was overrun with tiny children, which was part of the fun. Near the penguin exhibit, my walking was temporarily impeded by a girl, about three, who was having, really, the only appropriate reaction to this stuff: pulling on her father’s hand, pointing, and screaming, “DADDY! DUCK! DUCK! DUCK!” (You can see the ducks and the penguins on the aviary’s Penguin Cam.)

We particularly enjoyed the bird show “Wings!” It cost $5 extra, and it was so worth it. For about 20 minutes, we learned about birds and habitat conservation and – ok, mostly, birds flew around and it was so cool. The macaws showed off their climbing skills. A whole bunch of vultures flew right over my head, raising quite a wind. There were live people talking, but also a video that introduced the show and each bird’s habitat. Birds flew in either from over a wall or from cages up near the ceiling that were wired to open at certain times.

The show was fun, partly because birds are awesome and it’s impressive to see them up close, and partly because it had a toe firmly over the line that divides tasteful from cheesy. The last bird, a bald eagle, came out to “God Bless the U.S.A.” I think it actually struck a dramatic pose on the line “I’m proud to be an American.” At the end of its segment, it showed off its wings in front of a fireworks display on the screen.

Actually, even better than that was what happened after the show. They brought out a very disheveled-looking parrot with a special skill. This picture is terrible, but I have to share:

Her special skill is accepting dollar bills and putting them in the donation box. Don’t worry, I think the dishevelment is from molting, not disease. (I hope so, anyway.) She looked so pleased with herself. I was able to resist on this visit, but the next time I go, I’m taking a stack of one-dollar bills.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Here’s my conclusion after visiting the Mayflower II and Plimoth Plantation: Living history is not an efficient way to get information across.

I started my exploration of the big tourist attraction in Plymouth, Massachusetts, with the Mayflower II. It’s a replica of the Mayflower that was built in the 50s and sailed across the ocean from England to here. On the ship, it’s some day in March, and this guy – some kind of officer – is waiting to tell you about the ship.

This guy was great. He told us about conditions on the ship, about where people stayed, about how he was ready to go back home and he was supposed to be back in England last fall, but then they got stuck here over the winter, and so on. Another guy was belowdecks, telling us why he’d come over. (To teach the pilgrims, who were not actually called pilgrims, something useful. Maybe fishing? I don’t remember.)

The Mayflower II was kind of museumlike. There were displays on the dock about the pilgrims – what do you call them if you don’t call them pilgrims? Emigrants? There were displays on the docks about the emigrants, where they came from in England, why they’d been in the Netherlands before they emigrated, what they ate on board, and so on. That was pretty informative.

But over at the main museum, the Plimoth Plantation, the informativeness level tanked. Plimoth Plantation is a recreation of the first settlement, a few miles away. The year is 1627, seven years after the emigrants – colonists? Let’s call them colonists.  Seven years after the colonists landed. So they’ve settled in and they’re raking hay and hanging about in houses telling you things.

Here’s the thing. I am curious about the colonists. Like, you know, what crops they grew. What they died of. How many children they had. I don’t know, whatever. But the only way to learn anything is to seek out one of the costumed living history people – which was kind of hard – and ask them questions.

I don’t want to have to interview people in a museum. It’s awkward. If you asked a person a question, we learned, he might talk at you for 10 minutes on vaguely related topics, or he might look at you like you were crazy because you’d used some word his character didn’t understand.

So from one of the living history guys we came across, we learned about their theology, in more detail than I could handle, and from another, I got condescended to for my ignorance.

I’m not really sure what I wanted to know. I wanted the museum to decide that for me. It was like playing a game where there was information I was supposed to find out, but I didn’t know what it was or how to get it. Like Myst.

There were some signs, to tell you what part of the plantation you were entering. The largest section of Plimoth Plantation is the 1627 English Village. There’s also the Wampanoag Homesite, which represents the native people who lived in the area before the colonists arrived. The  people who work there are Native Americans who aren’t playing historical characters. Instead, they talk from a modern perspective. Before you go into the Wampanoag Homesite, you see this sign:

It’s pretty depressing that in the 21st century, you have to tell people not to use the word “squaws.” Also, the sign says to avoid “Native American” and “Indian” and instead say “Native People.” I would like to note that the only Wampanoag Homesite staffer we heard talk at length referred to Native People as “Indians.”

He and the other people working in the Wampanoag Homesite didn’t appear to be offended by us. They appeared to be bored. One guy did a little introduction to the house he was sitting in, which was informative but bored-sounding, and when people asked questions, his answers sounded not only bored, but also dismissive. We kept going up to different staffers and hoping that one would not be bored, and being disappointed.

So, to sum up, for $30, I got the sort of amusing experience of hearing bored people answering questions and chatty people going off on long tangents, when what I really wanted was some nice informative signs.

But then I enjoy clunky old natural history museums – if your primary goal is to learn things, you probably should skip the one in Prague, which I adored – so maybe there are tourists who similarly enjoy having awkward conversations with people in historical costumes?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The visitors’ center at the Miraflores Locks, as previously mentioned, is full of models of ships and various kinds of train equipment. Both historic models, from the early days of the canal 100 years ago, and modern models.

I love these models. I suppose some of the modern ones might be more or less mass-produced, but at least for the models of historic equipment, you know someone put a ton of love and care into each one. (I really hope that’s true of the modern ones, too.)

This is a dirt spreader; it runs on rails. Sorry, the museum is dark, so bear with me while I explain this murky picture.

Building the Panama Canal meant moving a lot of dirt. They had to get through the continental divide. Sure, the continent is only 30-some miles across right here, but there was still a lot of dirt dividing the low parts on either side. They blasted, they dug, they used the rails to haul stuff out. When they dumped it, they dumped it right by the side of the rails. And after they dumped it, this thing, the dirt spreader, went through and spread the dirt out so it wasn’t just all mounded up next to the rails.

This next model is also about moving dirt.

It’s a dredging ship. It was built in Scotland for the canal and started operating in 1913. Those buckets carry dirt up from the bottom.

Here’s a bit of a modern dredge:

It’s being used for the canal widening project, which is going on now. (They’re adding a third lane of locks that can handle much bigger ships.) This model was presented by Dredging International of Belgium. I kind of fell in love with the teensy life preservers:

Awwww.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Starting at the Pacific, ships in the Panama Canal go into the Miraflores locks, then the Pedro Miguel locks. That gets them up to the level of most of the canal. On the Caribbean side, they go down through the Gatun locks.

The Miraflores locks are the coolest – they raise ships by two steps, not just one – and also the closest to Panama City. They also score a huge visitors center.

The museum inside has four levels. You start at the bottom with the history of the canal. It started with a totally doomed French effort to build a sea-level canal, with no locks. Here are some French surveyors:

There were a lot of reasons why the French effort was doomed. For example, building a sea-level canal here was a really bad idea. (I believe the reasoning was along the lines of “Well, it worked for the Suez.”) One of the other reasons was that nobody had figured out how to fight yellow fever, which killed thousands of workers.

By the time the American effort started in 1904, about 15 years after the French gave up, Walter Reed had figured out that yellow fever was transmitted by mosquitoes. That means people were finally able to fight the disease. They did it in part by getting rid of places mosquitoes could breed, like puddles in dirt roads. These are some of the bricks that were used to pave roads:

You know the problem with most museums these days? They just don’t have enough piles of bricks.

After the floor about history, there’s a floor about water. Much of the canal follows the track of the Chagres River, but then it also crosses the continental divide and brings together water that was not originally joined. So building the canal created a new watershed, and all that water and wildlife and whatnot has to be managed.

The next floor has a cool section on how the Panama Canal operates, including a sped-up video of a container ship going through a lock, projected behind the windows of a mocked-up bridge. This was so realistic, I felt the need to adjust my balance when the ship was rocking from side to side.

There are also tons of ship models scattered through the visitors center, which I think I’ll save for another blog post.

The visitor center experience ends up on the top floor, which has one of several observation areas for watching ships go through the locks:

More on the locks later.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Here’s a weird fact. The “Panama Canal Museum” is in Seminole, Florida, and it’s just about the U.S. involvement in the canal.

The museum in Panama City is the “Museo del Canal Interoceánico de Panamá.” That is something along the lines of “Interoceanic Canal Museum of Panama.” Or “Interoceanic Panama Canal Museum.” Or “Panama Interoceanic Canal Museum.”

This museum is about the whole canal, from when it was but a twinkle in the eye of…um, somebody famous in olden times, to the 1880’s, when it was a totally messed-up French project, to when the U.S. picked it up in 1903 and finished it in 1914, to the handover when Panama took control of the canal in 1999.

I’m a little hazy on some of the details because there was no text in English. Which is fine – it’s not like most U.S. museums are falling over themselves to put writing on the walls in foreign languages, so I can’t really complain. (Notable exception.) They do provide a decent audio guide in English.

Unfortunately, most of the actual facts kind of went in one ear and out the other. Also, they don’t allow photos inside, so even if there had been English wall text, I couldn’t have taken pictures of it to remind myself.

So I present you with the one artifact you can take pictures of.

I bet every vaguely maritime-themed museum in the world has at least one of these on display. They’re really pretty. This one is made from brass and crystal. I think the audio guide said it was designed by the guy who made the Eiffel Tower, but now I’m not so sure, because I don’t think the Spanish label says that. It’s certainly connected to him somehow, and Mr. Eiffel was involved with the failed French attempt to build the canal – he was supposed to design the locks.

Oh, if you haven’t seen one of these, it’s a lighthouse light. Impressive, n’est-ce pas?

One of the things that most amused me was a reference to Sir Francis Drake as a pirate. Eh? Pirate? I thought he was, you know, a Sir of some sort, and didn’t he hang around with Elizabeth I? So I pulled out my handy Kindle with 3G and looked him up on Wikipedia. Answer: One man’s pirate is another man’s privateer. England and Spain were at war, so he could totally get away with pirating Spanish ships. Also, he was a slave trader. Ugh.

Later I used the handy Kindle to find out what the Spanish Main was. If you’d forced me to come up with a definition, I think I would’ve gone for, like, a fleet of ships. (Apparently I thought the Spanish Main was the Spanish Armada.) It turns out it was actually Spain’s mainland colonies around the Caribbean, particularly the Central American coastline. Am I the only one who didn’t know that?

They do have one other artifact you can take pictures of: the museum itself. It was built as the Grand Hotel in, uh, sometime in the 19th century, and later served as the headquarters for the French canal project, then the U.S. one. Those headquarters later moved, but when they were looking around for a place to put the museum, they came up with this building.

It’s quite grand, and it sits in the middle of a neighborhood with quite a grand past, Casco Viejo. (Here’s the UNESCO page about the area – it’s the Historic District, not “Panama Viejo,” which is the ruins of an earlier city near here.)

Keep an eye out for more canal-related blog posts in the near future. There are plenty of canal-related museums to go around. There’s even a website called canalmuseum.com. I don’t know what/where/who that is.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

Of course, Prague has lots of museums that aren’t natural history museums. We also stopped in on the Museum of Communism. I had been led to believe by the guidebook that this would be interesting. It has great posters all over town, like this:

It turns out the graphic design of the posters is the best thing it’s got going for it. The museum itself falls into a category I’ve seen before: lots of stuff and lots of ideology.

The people who started this museum clearly have a thing against Communism. I understand that. People had it tough behind the Iron Curtain. But the point of the museum appears to be to go on and on about how bad Communism is, and I prefer my museums more objective and less ranty. And it would have been nice if they’d spent some of that graphic design budget on a writer. Seriously, try to read this:

Huh? Try to summarize that in your own words. Now imagine reading it standing up after reading many other similarly dense texts. Ouch. Also, Brezhnev may have been an apathetic wreck, but let’s try to support that with examples or at least attribute the opinion to someone rather than just throwing it up there.

The museum does have a lot of cool stuff, although I would have appreciated more labels telling me what the cool stuff was or why I was looking at it.

This sort of thing may well be a fun trip down memory lane for someone who lived in Communist Czechoslovakia, but for the rest of us, it’s a bit mystifying.

Our favorite such scene was the classroom, complete with good Communist child and, one presumes, good Communist badger.

One thing I did learn at the museum was the story of the Stalin Monument in Prague, which is just the sort of story one wants when one is demonstrating the absolute absurdity of the Soviets.

This monument was big. Seriously big. It was the biggest monument ever made to Stalin, and I think he was a guy with no shortage of big monuments. This one was 50 feet tall and more than 70 feet long and stood on a hill above the Moldau. Here’s what it looked like:

You may note that I’m referring to it in the past tense. That’s because it didn’t survive long. It was unveiled in 1955, just as Stalin was falling out of favor. Seven years later, the statue was blown up. That’s right, with explosives. I hear the plinth is great for skateboarding.

I said the coolest thing about the museum is the posters – I was tempted to buy a t-shirt, even though I didn’t like the museum – but there were actually two other neat features. First, this is the stairway that leads up to get to the museum’s entrance (which it shares with a casino):

And, second, it’s right next to a McDonald’s. Yay for capitalism?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

The National Museum in Prague had a particularly large number of trilobites. I gather the Czech Republic is rich in them – the rocks that are at the surface there must be from an era when trilobites ruled the seas. Some even have some version of “Bohemia” in the names – Bohemia was the name for the western part of today’s Czech Republic, back before Czechoslovakia formed. For example, here’s our friend Bohemoharpes ungula ungula:

He appears to be an important little guy, because at some point he had his portrait done:

Going to a museum without many labels in English is kind of like going on some sort of a detective expedition. Why is this here? Why does it seem to be important? I wonder if this is connected to something we saw out in the hall:

It looks like a page in a book, but it’s actually the mirror image of a page in a book – it’s a stone used to print a lithograph. This actually did have an English label next to it, which said it’s a page of Bohemian trilobites from an 1852 book about the Silurian period in Central Bohemia. The Silurian ran from about 444 million years ago to about 416 million years ago – the dinosaurs didn’t appear til more than 150 million years after that, so we’re talking about a long time ago.

There’s a ton of different trilobites. Here’s a cutie:

The label says it was found in Prague, and it’s a Bumastus hornyi. (I can’t read Czech, but I know Latin names and the conventions of museum labels.)

Here are a bunch of its friends, one of many cases of trilobites in the museum:

See? All shapes and sizes. You may think “trilobite” and think it’s just one thing, but they’re really diverse; I’ve seen ones that are the size of a pinky fingernail and bigger than a dinner plate. And since they’re arthropods with hard exoskeletons, they get fossilized pretty easily and show up in rocks all over.

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Cases and cases of minerals. Stuffed animal skins. Grand staircases. This, my friends, is what a natural history museum should be. It’s on a hill at the end of Wenceslas Square in Prague, in the Czech Republic, and I was delighted to get to visit it a few weeks ago on a business trip to Central Europe (with some vacation thrown in, too).

The sign by the door tells you you’re getting “PREHISTORICAL, MINERALOGICAL AND PETROLOGICAL, ZOOLOGICAL, OSTEOLOGICAL, PALEONTOLOGICAL, ANTHROPOLOGICAL COLLECTIONS, THE NATIONAL MUSEUM LIBRARY.” So right away you know this is a museum to be reckoned with. And then you go inside, buy your ticket, and approach the collections from the bottom of this grand stairway:

Then imagine your excitement when you enter the first gallery of minerals and it looks like this:

The old wooden cases! The endless ranks of rocks, labeled only in Czech and completely uninterpreted!

My boyfriend and I had fun figuring out what the minerals were – some, like “kuprit” and “zinkit” were pretty easy, but we had trouble with “zlato” – the team was split between gold and pyrite. (It was gold; pyrite is “pyrit.”) “Smithsonit” was quite self-explanatory. Most I probably wouldn’t know in English, either, like “diopsid” and “smaragd” and “axinit.” We went from there into a room of meteorites (chondrites is “chondrity”), also displayed in beautiful wooden cabinets – which, the English sign told me, were designed by the architect of the National Museum building and a professor of mineralogy. The cases were installed soon after the building was completed in 1891.

The fun of working out what the minerals are is fairly representative of the kind of fun you can have in the National Museum in Prague. Now, you know I love my natural history museums, and this one is lovely. It’s great at one of the functions of natural history museums: displaying cool stuff. But it scores low on another function: educating the visitor. The schoolkids we saw wandering through looked pretty universally bored, with the exception of these girls:

The zoology halls were redone in the 60s – note the somewhat more modern-looking cases. Here’s a closer look over one girl’s shoulder:

Other exhibits in the museum included fossils, birds, reptiles, and an exhibit on Czech fairy tales that was really quite hard to follow if you are not familiar with (a) Czech fairy tales and (b) Czech.

The exhibit was kind of exciting to walk through, because it was modern and was done to feel like a forest and villages and such, so it had dim lighting, ramps and passageways, and a very different feel than the glass-cases-in-large-rooms aesthetic of the rest of the museum. There were even labels in English, but we couldn’t quite figure out what was going on; the exhibit appeared to be blending artifacts from the tribes that lived in the area thousands of years ago with the tales that Czech children grow up with, and it just didn’t make a lot of sense to a person who didn’t grow up with those stories.

I think that’s enough Czech natural history for one day. More soon.

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me

I have a thing about whales. They’re so big, and interesting, and mysterious. For a long time, the only things we knew about them were what we could see them doing at the surface of their world. And they do a lot of interesting things at the surface – breathing, jumping, tail-slapping – but it’s by no means all of their lives. They’re also cool because they’re like us – they’re mammals, they have babies, they feed them milk – and yet they’re so different from us. And they were hunted near to extinction because they’re so very useful. Whale oil is great stuff, and baleen was quite useful, too. (In umbrellas and corsets and such things.)

So two weeks ago, when I was in Maui for a story, I stopped in at the Old Lahaina Courthouse to see their display on whaling. Maui was an important stop for whalers. They left New England on years-long voyages to catch whales and stopped in at this tropical paradise to load up on supplies (potatoes, goats) and catch up on the fun (booze, ladies) they’d been deprived of at sea. There’s even a sea chanty called “Rolling Down to Old Maui.”

The display at the courthouse was a bit slim, but here are some cool items:

Those long things are called spades; they were used for cutting up whales. They’re resting in a pot used for melting down the blubber. Whale oil was used for things like lubricating sewing machines:

and lighting lighthouses:

This one used to be in the lighthouse on Hana, at the southwestern tip of Maui.

So, I wouldn’t recommend a special trip to Maui to see the Old Lahaina Courthouse, but I’d certainly stop in if you’re in the area, say, at one of the whalewatching tours that leave from the harbor across the street. That’s a somewhat nicer way to chase whales. The courthouse is right behind this awesome banyan tree, which takes up an entire block.

That’s the trunk in the background – it was planted in 1873. The aerial roots all came in later, reaching down from the branches to the ground. I sat under it for a while writing postcards, and a group of Japanese tourists gathered around me. I wonder where they are now?

For all my Museum Tourist posts, click here.

photos: me.