The Idaho Museum of Natural History has long been an inspiration.  My grandfather, Grumps, when I was younger, wasn’t the warmest most humorous person, but there was a point in time when he cut off one of his fingers in a hay machinery accident and he made humor out of it.  When he was a docent at the Museum, he would lead the tours of the kids’ field trips.  He would tell the kids that he was the oldest of dinosaurs and that he got too close to a dinosaur and it bit it (his finger) off.  So, that was his warning to the school kids, not to get too close to the exhibits or touch anything, so they wouldn’t lose a finger.

I’ve always enjoyed the museum. My first experiences, I couldn’t have been more than 5 or 6 years old, there were weekly classes that I could go to and learn about different things. I remember two of them; one about birds at the Birds’ exhibit, where we learned about hummingbirds. We took a field trip to a lady’s house that had a whole bunch of hummingbirds. We learned that their wings flap so many times a minute.  To see hummingbirds in real life at such a young age was really fascinating.

I learned a lot about local wildlife. With the reptiles, we got to see and touch and feel and learn about turtles and how the spine is fused to the shell. Things that you might learn about later on in zoology classes or something like that, but at such a young age, I got a hands-on experience with those things. And I don’t know if that’s why or if it’s just because I do, but I’ve always loved turtles, I’ve always loved hummingbirds,  things I was exposed to at the Museum.

On one field trip, similar to the ones that my grandpa would have been a docent to, I learned about the local Native American’s and their history, how they ate, and how they traveled and saw the artifact collections.  For me, it’s always been not just that’s it’s an artifact, but that belonged to a person, and that is somebody’s story.  This was the reality years ago and I try to relate history to anything that I can in modern days.

I continue to visit the museum with my kids a couple of times a year. We try to catch the exhibit changes that are unique to Idaho with the Hagerman horse.  My kids are totally interested in history.  They get really excited about the giant sloths and the buzzsaw sharks and they go home and draw them.  It’s lifelong learning and it’s exciting to see my kids excited about things that most people don’t even know about.  Please join me in carrying on a long tradition by supporting the Idaho Museum of Natural History.