Maine State Museum May Roundup

Museum Roundup

News & Updates from the Maine State Museum

May 2023

The Latest...

New French Documentary to Feature Samantha Smith

The Maine State Museum recently received a visit from French filmmaker Yannick Adam de Villiers, who is working on a new Samantha Smith documentary. Written and directed by de Villiers for Bonne Pioche, Canal+ Doc, the film will be out later this year.

Film crew with Curator of History and Decorative Arts Laurie LaBar preparing a pair of ballet shoes given to Samantha Smith by Kirov Ballet Prima Ballerina Alla Sizova during her trip to the Soviet Union in 1983.

Maine State Museum Staff Help Prevent Wildfires

On April 18, Maine State Museum educators and Maine Forest Rangers kicked off Wildfire Awareness Week 2023 with fun family friendly activities. Everyone had a blast learning the words to the Smokey Bear song, and all about forest ecology and management.

The museum's touch table displayed a variety of natural specimens for families to examine up close.

Educator Dave Hunt presents Logging Camps, River Drives, and Sawmills to a crowd of interested students. Dave is holding a peavey, a key tool used by 19th century loggers and river drivers.

Insect Collection Volunteers Star in Worlds Large and Small

Gail Everett spends hours each week carefully unfolding yellowed papers with aged, handwritten scientific names. She examines the moth specimen inside each and verifies related catalog information that she had previously entered into a database. She’ll do this over 3,500 times for this particular collection.

A collector in the 1930s caught or trapped thousands of insects for study. That collection has now benefited from hours of work by Gail Everett to organize and preserve its data.

As she unfolds each paper and organizes it and its tiny specimen in more stable storage, Gail, like her fellow insect collection volunteers, sees big worlds of people, places, environments, possibility, and understanding.

Volunteer Gail Everett unfolds a paper to reveal a moth collected in the 1930s that is now part of the museum’s insect collection.

Numbering over 100,000 specimens, the Maine State Museum’s insect collection is Maine’s largest. It represents the work of scores of collectors who have trapped insects and recorded data in backyards, on mountaintops, and along or in flowing streams. Now preserved in the museum, these specimens provide a unique view of the past, signal future threats to Maine’s flora and fauna, and serve as bellwethers of ecological change.

The museum’s 13 insect collection volunteers donated 920 hours of time, talent, patience, knowledge, and creativity in 2022. Headed by fellow volunteers Charlene Donahue and Dana Michaud, they solved challenges of analysis, record-keeping, identification, and storage that are all necessary to keep the collection and its data accessible. The volunteers' work has helped the Maine State Museum curate and care for the best publicly accessible insect collection in Mane. Kudos to this stellar group!

Museum Welcomes Natural Science Collections Manager

The museum’s natural science collections have received a boost recently with the appointment of Chase Gagne as an acting capacity collections manager.

New natural science collections manager Chase Gagne examines a recently acquired black duck specimen.

Chase brings a broad range of experience and education to the position. He has an M.S. in Entomology and a B.S. in Wildlife Ecology from the University of Maine. There, among many other academic activities, he also served as a part-time teaching assistant, curated the university’s insect collection, and initiated a scientific reference collection for ongoing entomological research projects.

At the museum, Chase has begun work on insect collection databases. He’s also started processing, researching, and organizing the museum’s extensive biological and plant collections. The opportunity to work with all types of materials is a big plus, as far as Chase is concerned. As he noted, “Here at the museum, I have the opportunity to become the well-rounded naturalist I have always wanted to be.”

The museum’s natural science collections are already benefiting from Chase’s expertise, enthusiasm, and varied interests. Welcome, Chase!

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