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The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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Here at the Academy The Naturalist Center
"The new museum should contain a Children's Room
in which will be displayed natural history objects such as are particularly
attractive and interesting to young children.... And there will be in
charge a well-educated, kindly, sympathetic woman, who knows animals and
plants, who knows the specimens in the museum; and who, above all, knows
and loves children." As patrons of the Academy's new museum on Howard Street make their way past the first floor's live fishes, snakes, and ants on up to the second floor, they are drawn toward a room with myriad creatures peering through its glass walls. The eyes of owls and egrets, long ago preserved for science, stare at passersby from their perches. Cream-colored bones and rainbows of shells, feathers, and beads fill cabinets and overflow from drawers. Pinned butterflies glinting with iridescent scales and moths in muted earth tones occupy frames on every wall. A giant cicada frozen motionless in a block of resin, a terrarium of live Mormon crickets, and sparkling minerals adorn the long front counter. This is the Academy's new Naturalist Center. Part learning library and part interactive exhibit, the Center is a metamorphosed version of the Academy's old Biodiversity Center in Golden Gate Park, and the brainchild of librarian Diane Sands. The new space is four times larger, better equipped, and engages the public on far more levels than its predecessor, yet still stays true to the goals of the previous incarnation: to highlight diversity and conservation. Although the Center accounts for just twelve percent of the new museum's floor space, nearly 90 percent of the museum's visitors (approximately 500 people each day) stop by to explore. Says Sands, "The Naturalist Center adds a missing element to the Academy-cool specimens to draw people in to a place where their questions can bubble up." The Center is a bridge between research and education. "It's a service we're providing-we're a portal to research and beyond," says Education Coordinator Rhonda Lucas, who is charged with maintaining the Center's wide-ranging specimen collection and host of educational programming. The best adjective to describe her is "versatile": Lucas either personally teaches or facilitates all the classes and workshops, as well as designing many of the Center's exhibits. In addition to the beefed-up eye and brain candy, the Center has also acquired up-to-date technological tools. Six computers line one wall, where young and old can surf the Internet and the Academy's website to solve homework problems or find answers to scientific questions. A flat-screen TV monitor on the wall displays classic nature films or, on occasion, zoomed-in views of real-life work being done under a nearby microscope. Sands and Lucas actively encourage visitors to use the microscopes (fingerprints are a good place to start), and even provide resin-encased insects. "Oooooh, I see it I see it!" Lucas says there's nothing better than hearing those words from a youngster looking through a microscope for the first time. Most of the center's specimens are hand-me downs, donated from the Academy's research departments because they lack critical information such as when and where they were collected, or because the material was deteriorating. But what was trash to some is clearly treasure to others. "We get a lot of positive feedback, like 'eew,' 'gross,' and 'that's so cool!'" Lucas says. Anyone who walks into the Naturalist Center can take advantage of this wow fest, but the interactive programs make it particularly popular among return visitors. There is Saturday morning story time in the center's extensive library, where the cozy caterpillar benches are a hit with kids. And Sands' bi-monthly science illustration demonstration encourages the artistically inclined to use Nature as their muse. Lucas also invites researchers from the Academy to get out of the lab and spend a day working in full view of the public. This program lets visitors talk with working scientists, from an entomologist pinning insects to an anthropologist identifying early hominid skulls. Lucas, herself a research scientist who studies snakes, also recruits volunteers for a citizen-science project spearheaded by the Academy. Called the Bay Area Ant Survey, the project aims to inventory local ant species and their relative numbers. The idea is that armies of informed museum-goers snooping around their neighborhoods can accomplish far more than one or two researchers working on their own. Interested visitors are given ant collection kits complete with magnifying glasses, vials, and data sheets, and are asked to return their packets so their data can be tabulated. Help from the public has broadened the scope of the research and encouraged a new level of ant enthusiasm. A lot of the fun at the Naturalist Center is impromptu-people wandering in and asking questions. A simple query can launch both staff and volunteers into a mini-tutorial. Even cleaning out the cricket tank can become a chance to explain their natural history. A photo on the center's front counter shows a pair of hands holding a collection of mottled bird eggs, a metaphor for what the museum is all about. "This is a place where you can explore, you can touch, and you can participate," Lucas says. Megan Mansell Williams is a writer living in New York and San Francisco. |
