218 Bell Museums Creator of Wildlife Dioramas - webapps8

Birds in
Natural Settings
Examples of two of Walter J.
Breckenridge's wildlife paintings.
Left: A big pileated
woodpecker samples wild grapes
in the fall of the year. Below:
In the branches of a birch, leafless
in mid-winter, a great gray
owl watches for prey.

For 60 years, Walter J. Breckenridge created
exhibits to stimulate viewers' curiosity about
the natural world. Naturalist, painter, taxidermist,
he saw himself primarily as an educator
4CT NOW ASK: What is our educa-
X tional system doing to encourage
personal, amateur scholarship in
the natural history field? Does the
educated citizen know he is only a cog
in an ecological mechanism? That if
he will work with that mechanism his
mental health and his material wealth
can expand indefinitely? But that if
he refuses to work with it, it will ultimately
grind him to dust? If education
does not teach us these things,
then what is education for?
Author-conservationist Aldo Leopold
posed these questions nearly 40
years ago in A Sand County Almanac
Bell
Museum's
Creator of
Wildlife
Dioramas
Don Luce and Gayle Crampton
Left: Prepared by Walter J. Breckenridge in 1940, a trio of
timber wolves scent a deer on the North Shore of Lake Superior
near Palisade Head. Diorama is on display at Bell Museum.
to help spark the environmental
movement. Several decades earlier,
Leopold and a few other scientists and
teachers had already foreseen the
negative effects of a growing population
and expanding industry on the
environment. By promoting the
teaching of natural history, they laid
the foundation for a greater understanding
of our natural surroundings.
One of those teachers was Walter
J. Breckenridge, past director of the
James Ford Bell Museum of Natural
History on the University of Minnesota
campus, Minneapolis. As a naturalist,
ecologist, photographer, and
37

Creator of Dioramas
illustrator, he spent much of his career
designing and creating educational
experiences to help us become
familiar with the natural world.
Anyone who has hiked trails in our
state parks lias been exposed to
Breckenridges work. Many children
saw their first moose or bear in a
Breckenridge diorama at Bell Museum.
In the museum s Touch and See
Room, they stroked a wolfs pelt or
touched the points on a rack of antlers.
These exhibits expressed the
spirit and philosophy of Walt
Breckenridge.
But this sophisticated level of environmental
education is a relatively
recent phenomenon. During Breckenridges
school years, little or nothing
was taught about natural history.
"When I was a boy," he recalled,
"no teacher ever mentioned anything
that was out-of-doors. Reading, writing,
and arithmetic were all they
thought about. I got acquainted with
outdoor things by playing hooky from
school and going down to play along
the creek."
At the University of Iowa, Breckenridge
studied zoology. Graduating
in 1926, he came to UM as a preparator
and taxidermist.
The museum, then housed in the
Zoology Building, was headed by the
well-known ornithologist T. S. Roberts.
Roberts had left a successful
medical career 10 years earlier to
pursue his interest in natural history
— compiling ornithological observations,
experimenting with bird photographs,
and directing the construc-
38
tion of dioramas. Breckenridge was
just the person Roberts needed.
Grass Machine. The young preparator's
first project was the Pipestone
Prairie diorama. The prairie
scene required more than 100,000
blades of artificial grass. The same
exhibit contained a buffalo-berry bush
for which 9,000 leaves were cut with
stencils and assembled by hand. Ordinarily,
plants for dioramas were
carefully hand-sculpted from colored
waxes and molds.
Faced with this daunting task,
Breckenridge set about devising a new
method of creating a prairie. He built
a machine operated by a foot pedal
which produced 2,500 blades of grass
in a day. Preparators mounted each
blade in a papier-mache base among
dead grass to produce the lifelike
plants in the prairie exhibit.
Breckenridge then constructed a
series of portable dioramas, one of the
museum's earliest efforts to extend
education beyond the walls of the
University. The cases, two feet square
and 10 inches deep, included scenes
of birds and other animals in small
slices of natural habitat.
These portable dioramas circulated
among schools — teachers used
them in natural history lessons. In
1927, 15 schools participated in the
program; by the next year the number
had doubled. Eventually more
than 150 cases were built. Many are
still used today.
When the museum's new home, the
Bell Museum, was completed in 1940,
Walter J. Breckenridge in workshop at Bell Museum, Minneapolis,
with animals prepared for exhibit — cormorants on rocks in 1942
(top, right), and wolves in 1941 (bottom, right).

Creator of Dioramas
Breckenridge supervised moving the
Pipestone Prairie and six other large
exhibits — no small task since the exhibits
could not be moved as units. A
herd of caribou in a bog, a beaver dam
and lodge, a cattail marsh containing
dozens of birds and nests had to be
carefully taken apart, moved down the
street, then reassembled.
In the new museum, Breckenridge
planned dioramas featuring
wolves, snow geese, sandhill cranes,
and more. To design and paint the
background panoramas, Francis Lee
Jaques came from New York where
he had worked as an artist for the
American Museum of Natural History.
Later, John Jarosz, a remarkably
talented taxidermist, joined the team.
Together they created a series of exhibits
for the museum that are still
considered among the finest in the
country.
Minnesota Habitats. Breckenridge
and Jaques wanted to design a
series of exhibits featuring species,
seasons, and habitats appropriate for
Minnesota. Breckenridge said:
"Our groups were planned as a trip
through the various habitats in Minnesota.
As you walked through the
exhibit halls, you traveled all around
the state, from the southeastern
hardwoods, up along the Mississippi,
out into the prairies in the west, and
back through the pine and spruce
woods in the north."
In the new exhibits, Breckenridge
and Jaques strove for biological accuracy
and educational value — the
dioramas were not to be glorified trophy
cases. Each exhibit featured ecological
stories that stimulated a visitor's
curiosity. Snow geese fly at the
peak of migration; sandhill cranes leap
in a courtship dance; songbirds mob
a great gray owl. Even the rocks, soil,
and vegetation are realistic. The result:
a set of exhibits of outstanding
beauty, realism, and authenticity.
Breckenridge also pioneered in
nature films. At first, he was restricted
to heavy, hand-cranked cameras.
Nevertheless, he collected valuable
footage. On one 1928 trip, he
filmed nesting cranes, a ruffed grouse
drumming, prairie chickens on their
booming grounds, and the first sequences
filmed of strutting sharptailed
grouse.
For years, his films were shown
during the museum's popular Sunday
afternoon programs. Later, Breckenridge
produced films to accompany
his Audubon Society lectures
throughout the country. Topics ranged
from the territorial behavior of birds
to current conservation issues. His
nature films were among the first to
be aired on public television.
40 Above: Wildlife artist Francis Lee Jaques painting background
for wolf group diorama, June 1940. Right: Breckenridge filming
winter wildlife at Lake 4, Cook County, March 1938.

Creator of Dioramas
Some films he made during research
or collecting trips to northern
Canada and the Arctic. He was one
of the first non-Eskimos since the
1800s to travel on the Back River in
Canada's Northwest Territory.
Park Programs. In 1947, soon after
becoming the museum's director,
Breckenridge saw an opportunity to
expand the education program to state
parks. At the time, the Department
of Conservation was buying land while
prices were low; no funds were available
for nature programs.
"We figured people visiting the
parks were good subjects," Breckenridge
said, "because by being there
they showed an interest in nature, but
probably didn't know much about it."
As a result, the State Park Interpretive
Program was created.
Breckenridge sent museum employee
Donald Lewis to Itasca State
Park for several summers. Lewis designed
nature trails, led hiking groups,
and lectured 011 the park s flora and
fauna.
The program grew rapidly. The first
year, 4,227 visitors to Itasca took part
in the program. By 1955, the figure
had grown to 15,917. Naturalists
joined the staffs at Gooseberry Falls,
Lake Shetek, and Whitewater state
parks. For several years, Bell Museum
continued to pay part of their
salaries. As the interpretive program
grew, more parks began to participate.
Today, Breckenridge's interpretive
programs have expanded to nearly
every state park in Minnesota.
In recent photo, Breckenridge holds skin
of wood duck to depict bird accurately.
Since his retirement as museum
director in 1969, Breckenridge has
devoted his days to painting. His work
has appeared in such prestigious exhibitions
as "Birds in Art at the
Woodson Museum in Wisconsin and
at the Wildlife Heritage Art Show in
Minneapolis. In recent years, he has
traveled to Africa, South America, and
New Zealand in search of new subject
material. The artist's studio is in
his home in Brooklyn Park.
His artistic career started a halfcentury
ago. In the early 1930s, he
painted the shorebirds and woodpeckers
for T. S. Roberts' The Birds
of Minnesota and illustrated maga-
42 THE MINNESOTA VOLUNTEER

Walter J. Breckenridge:
A Life in Natural History
An exhibition displaying photographs, artifacts,
and paintings from Dr. Breckenridge's
60-year career as an educator and
interpreter of natural history now appears
at the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural
History, 10 Church Street SE, on the Minneapolis
campus of the University of Minnesota.
The exhibition will remain open until
March 15,1987.
-fr 1k ft
zine articles on natural history with
drawings and paintings.
These days it's hard to coax him
away from his easel. But promoter of
natural history that he is, Breckenridge,
at age 83, still delivers lectures,
writes articles, and serves on
committees of The Nature Conservancy
and Audubon Society.
His goal, as always: to encourage
interest and scholarship in the fascinating
study of natural history. •
Dun Luce is Assistant Curator of Exhibits,
James Ford Bell Museum of
Natural History, Minneapolis. With
Chris Brooks, he wrote about wildlife
painter Francis Lee Jaques in
"Master Painter of the North Country"
in the November-December 1984
Volunteer. Gayle Crampton is a special
research assistant at the Bell
Museum.
What Northeastern Minnesota Woodland Owners Value Most
"WANTED: 10 to 49 acres wooded upland with paved road access, lake or stream
access, excellent fishing, abundant wildlife, pine or oak trees. A University of
Minnesota study found that these property characteristics were most highly prized
by buyers of woodland in 13 northeastern Minnesota counties.
— University of Minnesota, Minnesota Extension Service
Promise and Proof of Changing Season
"CHANGE has already set in. Slight change. That's one thing you must say for
January: Its daylight hours increase rather than diminish . . . sunset now comes
later. By the end of January there will be about three-quarters of an hour more
daylight.
"Thus do winters days change, even as molasses-slow January flows past. Already,
if we watch the sunset closely, we can glimpse the end of winter. On a
brittle cold day that ice-green band of light may mark the horizon . but it
comes later than it did a week ago. It's still a matter of minutes, but the change
has begun. That's the promise, and that's the proof."
— Editorial in The New York Times
JANUARY-FEBRUARY 1987
43