Caring for the Collections

Throughout the months of June, July and August, a rotating team of ten volunteers logged over 180 hours to help us move specimens and museum cabinets & shelving, out of the retired transport trailer in which they’d spent 12 years in storage. 

They sorted and packed jars of preserved fish, frogs, snakes & mysterious sea creatures, trays of mussel shells, Vertebrate skeletons, boxes of pressed plants, bags of dry drifted material, and discovered many surprising treasures like walrus skulls, a stuffed Chipmunk, and a mummified Armadillo. 

On tables under a canopy set up beside the house, we carefully sorted and re-packed specimens into wooden trays and then re-filled the cabinets inside the shipping container. Then there were metal and wooden shelving units to empty and trailer to a second shipping container several kilometres away, and boxes and jars to haul there to fill the shelves again.

Sturdy volunteers heaved 14 double-walled steel museum cabinets across the street and into a shipping container in our driveway.

Our Saturday collection-moving bees became social events complete with snacks and refreshments, boosting progress in a most encouraging way. Even on Canada Day, one intrepid volunteer showed up to work with me in the mid-thirties heat, moving specimens from the lab trailer, with Fred, packing trays and boxes inside the house.

Progress was slower in July and August. After a week-long hiatus for a not-too-severe case of the flu (thanks to a double-course of Tamiflu) I was back on my feet, and keen to report that thanks to several volunteers working all week, the Lab Trailer was 3/4 empty! We could actually see the top of the far wall over the diminishing pile of boxes of our “Canadian Library of Drifted Material.” 

Trays and boxes still waited to be sorted and packed, along the right side, and five filing cabinets to be emptied, moved to the centre aisle of the shipping container and refilled there, as well as a few shelving units to be emptied and moved out, but the two shipping containers still had more than half their space yet to be filled,  and that was encouraging! 

The work felt worthwhile to all of us, saving specimens that have been kept thus far - many from the 1950's - so we laboured on, to make sure the physical evidence of biodiversity through the decades is conserved for education and research. 

A couple of our volunteers went off to day jobs in July, and one of the most active volunteers who was going to be an intern, suddenly accepted a job in the military - which left us rather short-handed for what could be only one week more of work if we’d had continuous help.  So "the end of June" had to be extended to "the end of July" - which was so rainy that most days we couldn’t move anything across the street. 

We managed to meet the extended deadline of August 31, 

...and in my final FaceBook post on the project I wrote:

“I am too tired to write, except to thank our loyal and enthusiastic volunteers, who put in a combined 180 hours in sorting, packing, and moving from June until now. "

Fred gives a nice overview in an e-mail to a supporter:

"Our final team of movers did a lot of heavy lifting yesterday to get the last of the cabinets out, and I carried what felt like 1,382 armloads of stuff across the street, we got all the maps into the map cabinet, and just need to work out a sequence of other things that we brought into the house for further sorting."

We kept out a selection of specimens to display at a community day in our village of Bishops Mills, the most impressive of which was the very heavy skull of a Walrus!

The Royal Ontario Museum is taking the bin of documents from past herpetology curator Shelly Logier, and Akwesasne is taking 4 boxes of photocopies that had come to us, pertaining to the history of government/indigenous relations, so we're actually beginning to disperse stuff. 

Next we have to meet with the municipality to discuss support for storage, and long term plans for a public space in which at least some of the museum cabinets may be put to good use once the collections have been downsized. 

Downsizing will involve approaching museums to see what arrangements we can make to donate specimens they can use - and alongside all of this, we'll be getting the database online with images. 

We will be arranging for curation space this winter, so that some of our keen volunteers may return for further sorting of pressed plants and mussel shells in preparation for sending to museums in Saint John, Ottawa, and Toronto.