How I love conversing with visitors in the diorama halls!  And the dioramas themselves are a delightful improvement to how the halls looked in 1908.  Why, when I first visited the museum then, the halls were lined with glass cases and shelves of mounted birds and animals, all carefully displayed in order of scientific category.  The very idea of putting plants and animals and birds in the same grouping and creating natural settings - ‘habitats’ I believe you call them today - this was not considered good science if one wanted  to show off a collection. For instance, I carry with me a photograph of the early museum’s egg collection, said to be the finest in North America.  The collection was displayed as groups of eggs in little wooden cubicles, with not a bird or a nest in sight!  Where were these eggs found in nature?   What was the particular grace and attitude of the bird that laid them?  These dioramas of today, where birds and their nests and their eggs are all together in an artistic scene that mimics the natural world are much more pleasing and more instructive as well.  I feel as if I have truly encountered a moment in the natural world, and the visitors I speak with agree.

And just today I spoke with a family from Boston, Massachusetts.  They had little knowledge of what one might encounter at the top of our Rocky Mountains.  We sat near the alpine tundra diorama and talked about the animals one might encounter, such as the pica or marmot, both depicted there. I shared the story of Julia Archibald Holmes, the first woman to climb Pike’s Peak and the first to record, in letters to her family back east, the glorious sights available from that vantage point. Her letters describe what few had ever seen.  I daresay for all of the photography that exists today, nothing replaces truly being there in person, being out in nature for yourself.  The visitors from Boston, which, by the way, was Julia’s hometown, were inspired to make a trip to the top of Pike’s Peak, though I warned them that they should take plenty of wraps against a turn in the weather.   Julia wrote of being caught in a snow squall up there when she climbed in August of 1858.  It would seem that Colorado weather remains unpredictable no matter what the era!

One day, I was contemplating the great bison diorama – many call those animals ‘buffalo’.  An interesting moving picture device with a talking narration that tells the story of the bison plays continually there.  As I listened to the story of the bison’s journey to near extinction and how in the years since the museum opened in 1908 much has been done to save this creature, I was reminded of a woman long ago who had a similar thought in mind.  It seems that back in the early 1870s, Colorado cowboy Charles Goodnight bought a ranch in west Texas in Palo Dura Canyon and took his new wife, Mary Ann, and plunked her there to keep house while he and his hands worked cattle.   This was at the time when the great bison herds were being slaughtered for their hides and to make way for progress.  Buffalo hunters wouldn’t waste a good bullet on killing calves, as they would eventually starve without their mothers, so amid the carnage, baby bison were left to their own devices.   Mary Ann said she would lay awake at night listening to the calves crying, and finally she could stand it no longer.  She told her husband to bring her the bison calves, and she’d raise them.  He did, and she did, and the Goodnight Bison Herd was formed.  I understand that herd still exists today on the very ground where Mary Ann raised them, the very ground that bison have inhabited since prehistoric times.  Women with sensitivities for the natural world have been contributing, unsung, for many generations, and Mary Ann was one of them.  Thanks to her foresight, many bison were saved.      

I could write on and on of the interesting encounters I have daily with visitors.  How eager they are to understand more, and if they do not excuse themselves and move on, I’ll keep telling stories for a good long time!  I encourage people to know more about the amazing natural world, and all that science has learned about it.  Then we shall be assured that 100 years from now, this museum and the natural world it supports will still be here for others to enjoy.