How Gertrude the Hippo led me to the Burke

By Norah Farnham
Guest Writer

When I was hired as the hippo zookeeper at Woodland Park Zoo in 1999, the hippos were the first animals I was assigned to care for, and I have been with them ever since.

Though I had worked as a zookeeper for 13 years at two previous zoological facilities, I had never worked with Common, or Nile, Hippos. I was instantly fascinated by 36-year-old Gertrude (Gertie) and 21-year-old Water Lily – and so were the zoo visitors.

The hippopotamus is one of Africa’s most iconic animals, and a favorite among zoo visitors. Their immense size and aquatic habits make them one of the most recognizable and popular animals, and one that people expect to see when they visit a zoo.

Since hippos commonly live only into their 40s, and hippos are highly social animals, it was not long after I became the hippo keeper that we began discussions about adding a third hippo to our group, as company for Lily when Gert eventually passed. In 2003, we welcomed 2-year-old Guadalupe as the newest member of our little herd.


Water Lily, Gertrude, and Guadalupe
Dennis Dow/Woodland Park Zoo

Short Takes on Plastics

Look around you and you'll notice that plastics are everywhere today. From children’s toys to parts on the Mars rover Curiosity. It’s difficult to imagine what life was like before them. Products made with plastic are often more convenient, cheaper, lighter, safer and more durable, but they also present unwanted side effects to our health, cultures, and environments across the globe.

As part of our Plastics Unwrapped exhibit at the Burke, we recently invited a range of experts from the University of Washington (UW) and beyond to present their perspective (or "Short Takes") on a range of topics related to plastics in front of a live audience at the Neptune Theatre in Seattle. We've captured a few of the presentations on video to share with you:

What was life like before plastics?
Lauren Palmor, a UW Art History student shows what life was like before plastics - specifically related to food. How did people preserve their food without plastic? Watch Lauren's presentation in this video to find out:

Plastics in our Collections: A Sign of the Changing Material Culture?

"Before Plastics" objects on display

in the Plastics Unwrapped exhibit

The Burke Museum’s new exhibit, Plastics Unwrapped, examines how plastics went from being rare to being everywhere in a short period of time, and how material culture was changed by plastics.

To help visitors explore what life was like before plastics, several objects from the Burke’s ethnology collections – made from a range of materials found in nature – are on display. These objects include: a rain hat made of twined cedar bark, a child’s waterproof parka made of seal gut, toy blocks made of wood, and containers made of clay.

That made me wonder, will more and more plastic objects begin to make their way into the Burke Museum’s permanent collections as a reflection of this shift in material culture?

I asked Rebecca Andrews, ethnology collections manager, and she pointed me towards several objects in the ethnology collection that are either partially or fully comprised of plastic. For example:

Tracked at the molecular level: Wolverines return to the North Cascades



Logan was live-captured for the first time on January 24, 2013
near Easy Pass. (Photo by U.S. Forest Service).

Wolverines are one of the rarest and most elusive mammals in North America. After being hunted to extinction in Washington state in the 1930s, they’re finally starting to return to the northern Cascade Range.

Keith Aubry, research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, has led a study to track wolverines found in Washington since 2006. Each winter, he and his team carefully live-capture wolverines, like “Logan,” the young male in the photograph to the right, to document their appearance, sex, age, and condition.

There's hope for the survival of frogs

Leopard running frog, Kassina arboricola.
Photo by Duncan Reid.

Amphibians are one of the most threatened animal groups in the world; almost one third of all species are under severe threat. One of the main reasons for this is a nearly worldwide distribution of a chytrid fungus that causes a highly-lethal disease in frogs, called Chytridiomycosis. The fungus attacks the skin and blocks respiration in infected frogs, eventually killing the animal.

Chytrid is particularly widespread in Africa, with new positive records reported from countries in southern, eastern, and central Africa each year. One hypothesis is that the chytrid fungus originated in Africa and dispersed globally via the pet trade.

My Month Without Plastic: I Survived

 

The plastic waste generated during my month without plastics.

I made it! I survived a month "without" plastic. I managed to mostly avoid purchasing new plastic but still left a small trail of plastic waste behind (see the photo to the right).

It’s less than I expected, which is somewhat of a relief, but I still cringe when I think about this waste still being around for decades after this challenge is over.

We forget about our trash rather quickly when we throw something “away,” but “away” is still somewhere. One of the walls in the Burke's Plastics Unwrapped exhibit is covered with 3,000 plastic bags–the number used every single second by people like me, who hadn’t thought about the consequences of common consumption. I believe as people who can make choices for ourselves, we have a duty to become more aware of our impact and to make a change.

Parrington artifacts: A collector's story



Vernon L. Parrington in his office at the University of
Oklahoma, ca. 1905. Photograph courtesy of Sarah Parrington.

Objects in museums hold many stories—often of their makers and users, and also, sometimes, of their collectors.

That's the case with several beautiful Native American artifacts recently donated to the Burke Museum from the family of Vernon Louis Parrington, a longtime English professor at the University of Washington (UW) in the early 1900s.

Parrington was born in Illinois in 1871. He graduated from Harvard College in 1893 and taught English for four years at Emporia College in Kansas before moving on to teach at the University of Oklahoma.