Pat McShea

November 10, 2023 by Erin Southerland

A Tree Pittsburgh Biocube

by Patrick McShea

On a late October afternoon, Joe Stavish, Director of Education for Tree Pittsburgh, uses a biocube in one of the organization’s greenhouses to show off the golden fall foliage of northern spicebush saplings. If the cube could accompany one of these native shrubs when it’s planted in a local park as part of forest understory restoration, the open-sided green frame might document a surprising variety of wildlife.

During the early weeks of spring, northern spicebush again adds bright color to forest landscapes when its leafless branches bear tiny gold flowers whose nectar and pollen provides critical nourishment for a host of native bees. Close attention to blossom visitors within the biocube could lead to the documentation of dozens of insect species at this stage.

Early spring observations might also detect what appears to be a narrow, two-inch-long dead leaf attached to one of the shrub’s twigs. This is the over-wintering chrysalis of the spicebush swallowtail, a butterfly whose caterpillars are known to favor the spicebush leaves as a food source. After the plant is fully leafed, observation of spicebush foliage within the biocube might produce a sighting of the caterpillar’s distinctive fifth instar or larval stage.

The broad head of the caterpillar at this stage sports two false eye spots, markings that might provide some predator protection by contributing to an overall visual impression of a small alert snake.

In late summer and early fall, when the ripening of the plant’s fruit is signaled by a green to red color change, the biocube would likely have some avian visitors. The ripened fruits are an important seasonal food source for Wood Thrush and other migrating songbirds. In actions that would likely occur outside the bounds of the biocube, these birds contribute to overall health of northern spicebush in our forests by spreading the plants’ seeds in their droppings.

Patrick McShea is an Educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Turtle-Centered Learning

by Patrick McShea

This fall, for elementary students in the Meadville area, visits to the school library became opportunities to learn more about turtles. Beth Heuchert, Elementary Librarian for three buildings in northwestern Pennsylvania’s Crawford Central School District, was the force behind the collective concentration on the shelled reptiles. She selected The Book of Turtles, a new work by Sy Montgomery and Matt Patterson (Clarion Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, 2023), to be the focal point for September library sessions. Then, to establish three-dimensional, and in some cases touchable, extensions for the book’s 39 pages of colorful illustrations, she borrowed a wide range of turtle-related materials from the museum’s Learning Collection.

*In the museum’s Turtles of Pennsylvania display on the Kamin Overlook, an eastern box turtle (4) and wood turtle (5) flank a copy of* The Book of Turtles.

In explaining her joint use of children’s literature and museum materials, Beth outlined multiple activity strands for engaging a wide age range of young learners.

With the Kindergarten and grade 1, I read aloud a story book about a turtle, Truman, by Jean Reidy, followed by The Book of Turtles–which I read over a couple of classes. Students looked at and got to touch the sea turtle shell and model, along with the turtle taxidermy mounts in the cases. Students shared what they noticed about the turtles and what facts they remembered. Then they drew their own turtles (adding patterns) or colored in a picture of an Eastern box or sea turtle.

With grades 2 through 6, I tried out something new involving centers in the library. We read The Book of Turtles as a group, and then the students went to their tables where they worked while taking turns to examine copies of the book. Two of the centers were ‘research’ tables. These spaces featured materials from the museum along with other books on turtles.

The complementary resources enabled students to write down or draw what they observed, answer questions, and generate lots more questions about turtles for future research. Other centers were set up to encourage Independent Reading, and a Read and Create Center where students made turtles out of LEGOS, created origami turtles, turtle-themed tangrams, or turtle images with standard drawing materials.

*As part of the school loan, a sturdy plastic model of a green turtle represented ocean-dwelling turtle species.*

Connections between freshwater turtle shells from the museum and a full-page turtle skeleton illustration in the featured book were particularly important. In combination, the touchable specimens and the detailed image provided reinforcing lines of evidence for interpreting the spine and ribs as inseparable bone components of a turtle’s shell.

A cultural link between the museum materials and The Book of Turtles also deserves mention. The work’s concluding illustration, a full-color depiction of turtle bearing a vegetated island atop its shell, is captioned with a broad historical reference: Ancient stories from around the world tell us how people believed the Earth was carried on the back of a turtle. For some students, the statement provided a perfect segway into the exploration of an older turtle-focused book, Thirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back, by Joseph Bruchac and Jonathan London, with illustrations by Thomas Locker.

*The T*hirteen Moons on Turtle’s Back toolbox.

By dedicating the now 31-year-old work “To the children of Turtle Island,” the authors honor the shelled reptile’s foundational role in Native American legend. The poetic text, in conjunction with a concluding page titled, “A note about this book,” draws reader attention to another aspect of turtle anatomy, the thirteen large scales that create the outer surface of a turtle’s carapace or upper shell. As the book note explains, Many Native American people look at Turtle’s back as a sort of calendar, with its pattern of thirteen large scales standing for the thirteen moons in each year.

A colorfully illustrated toolbox bearing turtle shells and twenty copies of the book was part of the loan from the museum. The books’ use, under the direction of a skilled elementary school librarian, pushed turtle activities into interdisciplinary territory where students learned something about how changing seasons and the passage of time are marked in Native America cultures.

Learn more about this classroom-enriching program.

Patrick McShea is an educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Museum Connections to a College Lab

by Patrick McShea

During a recent Vertebrate Diversity Lab at Duquesne University, Dr. Brady Porter’s students closely examined preserved wildlife material on five rows of tables. Weeks earlier, Brady arranged to borrow a variety of vertebrate specimens from Carnegie Museum of Natural History; lizards, snakes, and turtles preserved whole in jars of alcohol, a set of mammal skulls presenting strikingly different dental formulas, and birds preserved in the flat and ridged form known as study skins.

As the manager of the museum’s Educator Loan Collection, I provided 15 bird study skins for the lab. When I expressed curiosity about how the preserved birds would be received by a college audience, Brady invited me to observe the encounter.

students looking at bird study skins on a lab table

What I observed was an exceptional blend of instruction and inquiry. As the students circulated, singly or in pairs, among the specimen-rich workstations, Brady also moved about the lab, answering individual questions, and providing pointed suggestions in a voice clearly audible to every member of the class. While I watched two students gently check a pied-billed grebe study skin for the presence or absence of the stiff facial feathers known as bristles, for example, I listened to Brady’s advice to a student at an adjoining table who had just picked-up an opossum jaw. “It might be easier to do the dental formula on one side and then double it. And look carefully at every place a tooth could be because teeth can fall out.”

grebe and woodcock study skins on a table — *Study skins – American Woodcock (top) and Pied-billed Grebe (bottom)*

No caveats were necessary for the bird study skins, where worksheet questions directed students to look for and interpret the functional importance of such features as the sharp talons and distinctive hooked beaks of raptors, and the tiny, but fully functional feet of hummingbirds. Some questions served to remind the students about how whole suites of physical features were historically used to create the detailed chart of relationships that is the vertebrate classification system. Here the pied-billed grebe, a species so adapted to aquatic life that mated pairs construct floating nests, provided a tactile reference point for a question directed several levels back in the classification chart. “What is the name of the bird Clade that includes most of the waterbirds?”

During an hour-long observation of the lab, it was clear how much the professor-directed learning experience was dependent upon the authentic materials. Had photographs or digital images been used as substitutes, they would not have conveyed all the information embodied in the preserved birds. In less structured situations, however, the usefulness of study skins as teaching aids fades.

At the museum, visitors encounter 21 study skins displayed amidst nearly 300 life-like taxidermy mounts in Bird Hall.

Museum label that explains study skins. Text says "You will see two types of bird specimens in this hallway. Taxidermy mounts: life-like display, less than one percent of the collection is prepared this way. Study skin: preserved flat on its back for easy storage and scientific study." There are illustrations of both study skins and a taxidermy mount.

On the Grand Staircase side of the long narrow exhibition, an informational panel introduces the two types of bird specimens, summarizes their difference, and notes how ratio of preservation forms is completely reversed behind-the-scenes.

In explaining the usefulness of bird study skins to elementary and middle school audiences, I have long relied upon an explanation of theoretic researchers visiting the CMNH Section of Birds to gather data for a study about wing length variation in a species with a wide geographic range. “They’d have a difficult time working with taxidermy mounts.” I’d explain. “One mount might have been prepared with the wings fully open, another with them partially open, and a third with folded wings. With the standardized preparation method and form of study skins, those researchers would get accurate comparable measurements.”

My visit to the Duquesne University biology lab has added a more student-focused detail to the explanation: “Lots of the physical characteristics used for classification can be observed by examining bird study skins, and in a future class you might have an opportunity to be a close observer.”

Patrick McShea is an Educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Hispanic Heritage Month Scavenger Hunt: Three Birds and a Butterfly

by Patrick McShea

Hispanic Heritage Month creates an opportunity to consider how we share some forms of winged wildlife with Spanish-speaking regions far to our south. At this time of year, many bird species that are widely considered to be Pennsylvania residents are in the process of a long seasonal migration to warmer climates.

This migratory behavior pattern, established long ago in each species’ evolutionary history, occurs every fall, and reverses with northward movement in the spring. Just as we might consider the wild creatures who spend summers with us to be ours, the people at the Caribbean, Central American, and South American locations where these creatures pass the months of our Pennsylvania winter might consider the winged seasonal visitors to be theirs.

An informal walk to locate three migratory birds and one migratory butterfly among the exhibition halls of Carnegie Museum of Natural History is a good way build background knowledge about wildlife sharing. Recognition of such sharing is a step toward understanding more about other cultures.

Stop #1: Scarlet Tanager (known in Spanish as Piranga Escarlata)

Within the interactive space known as Discovery Basecamp, the Scarlet Tanager’s bright plumage should be easy to locate among other encased bird taxidermy mounts. As the species account in All About Birds states: Male Scarlet Tanagers are among the most blindingly gorgeous birds in an eastern forest in summer, with blood-red bodies set off by jet-black wings and tail.

Recent population studies, which included lots of community science generated data, indicate that Pennsylvania supports more breeding pairs of Scarlet Tanagers than any other state.

Because this species feeds and nests high in the tree canopy, learning to recognize their distinctive song is a good way to spot one. If this technique enables you to spot a bright red male or yellowish-green female, remember that for some months of the year the bird you’re watching might reside in forests as far away as Bolivia.

Stop #2: Monarch Butterfly (known in Spanish as Mariposa Monarca)

diorama of a monarch butterfly on a milkweed plant

The familiar orange and black monarch butterfly flitting across your neighborhood in the fall might be embarking on an incredible journey from field edges in Pennsylvania to the cool and relatively moist habitat of oyamel fir forests in Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains. The seasonal movement of monarchs across the North American continent is one of the longest migrations of any insect. In full cycle, however, it differs from bird migration in reliance upon multiple generations.

The long southbound fall journey is completed by some of the individual butterflies who embark upon it. These butterflies initiate northward migration in the spring, but no individuals complete the roundtrip journey. Northbound female monarchs lay eggs for a subsequent generation to continue the migration to our region.

Female monarchs lay eggs on the leaves of milkweed plants, the food source for the caterpillars that hatch within days. The display in the Hall of Botany depicts two of the eleven species of milkweed native to Pennsylvania.

Stop #3: Chimney Swift (known in Spanish as Vencejo de Chimenea)

In urban, suburban, and even rural areas of southwestern Pennsylvania, the high-pitched twittering cries of circling Chimney Swifts create a soundtrack for summer days. The birds’ aerial maneuvers are a mix of rapid wing beats and dynamic glides, and much of the action relates to feeding. Chimney Swifts eat on the wing, using their unusually large mouths to capture up to 5,000 flying insects per day.

When the birds disappear from our skies in the fall, they undertake a journey of thousands of miles to the upper reaches of South America’s Amazon Basin, in Peru, Ecuador, and Brazil, where they spend much of the winter.

In our region, the species roosted and nested in hollow trees before the proliferation of chimneys that accompanied the European colonization of North America. The species is so physically adapted to life on the wing that it is unable to perch upright for long. Note the protruding tail feather shafts on the taxidermy mount. These stiff braces help the bird to hold resting positions against the interior vertical surfaces of chimneys or hollow trees.

Stop #4: Ruby-throated Hummingbird (known in Spanish as Colibri Gorjirrubi)

Although there is a Ruby-throated Hummingbird taxidermy mount immediately adjacent to the Chimney Swift mount, the specimen pictured above is located elsewhere in Bird Hall. This female bird, displayed on a nest, is in “study skin” form. Study skins lack the glass eyes and life-like poses of taxidermy mounts, and their uniform flatness facilitates both storage and scientific study. Most of the 190,000 birds in the museum’s scientific collection (including many from Spanish-speaking regions of the world) are in study skin form.

From May through December, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds attract our attention when they visit some of the flowers we tend, or feeders placed specifically to attract the birds. The species’ diet also includes mosquitoes, gnats, fruit flies, small bees, and spiders. On their breeding grounds, six to ten days of construction work by the female bird results in an inch-deep, two-inch diameter, branch-top nest lined with plant down, held together with spider silk, and for concealment purposes, shingled with lichen chips.

Their annual southward migration includes passage over or around the Gulf of Mexico to reach wintering grounds that stretch southward from Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula to Costa Rica.

Maps indicating breeding ranges, wintering grounds, and the migration corridors between those locations are critically important tools for understanding the movements of migratory wildlife within and between continents. Much of the information about the birds profiled in this activity comes from species accounts of All About Birds, an encyclopedic online resource maintained by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. In each account, a species’ continental-scale migration movements are depicted on color-coded maps.

Another notable facet of the website maintained by Cornell Lab of Ornithology is the availability of education materials in Spanish.

Patrick McShea is an Educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

Blog author: McShea, Patrick
Publication date: October 6, 2023

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Location key:

Stop #1: Discovery Basecamp

Stop #2: Hall of Botany

Stop #3: Bird Hall

Stop #4: Bird Hall

September 7, 2023 by Erin Southerland

We Get Questions: Climate Change, Hope, and Action

by Patrick McShea

a paperback copy of the book "The Sixth Extinction"

“Tell me what gives you hope?” The student’s question during a high school environmental science class in March left me scrambling to deliver a clear and honest answer. “Tell me,” she added for emphasis, “because I really want to know.”

Ten students had just listened to me explain the cascade of negative effects associated with the increasing acidification of ocean waters. The frightful phenomenon is on a scale proportional to and correlated with the climate altering changes in Earth’s atmosphere. My presentation was a summary of a single chapter in The Sixth Extinction, science writer Elizabeth Kolbert’s landmark 2014 book exploring warning signs of a coming human-induced extinction event as destructive as the five previous episodes documented in the fossil record.

In “The Sea Around Us,” a chapter whose title pays homage Rachel Carson’s best-selling 1951 book by that name, Kolbert frames her ocean report with an explanation of a vital large-scale chemical interaction:

Ocean covers seventy percent of the earth’s surface, and everywhere that water and air come into contact there’s an exchange. Gases from the atmosphere get absorbed by the ocean and gases dissolved in the ocean are released into the atmosphere. When the two are in equilibrium, roughly the same quantities are being dissolved as are being released. Change the atmosphere’s composition, as we have done, and the exchange becomes lopsided: more carbon dioxide enters the water than comes back out.

Much of the chapter consists of Kolbert’s account of her visit with scientists studying marine life in a bay of the Tyrrhenian Sea where water chemistry has long been impacted by carbon dioxide-rich discharges from submerged volcanic vents. The narrative helped the students understand how researchers use models to make predictions, and that ecological models are not always computer simulations. In a summary of acidification impacts in the study area, Kolbert notes limpet shells bearing “deep lesions through which their owner’s putty-colored bodies can be seen.” Perhaps my sharing of this type of graphic detail spurred the student’s urgent question about hope.

My answer, which lacked quotable coherence, involved trees. Speaking directly to the questioning student, but addressing the entire class, I explained how for more than a decade my New Year’s resolution has been simply to learn more about trees, and that months earlier a New York Times profile of renowned medical biochemist and botanist Diana Beresford-Kroeger had been particularly instructive. Her endorsement of global forest restoration to mitigate the effects of climate change is clear, and some of her research has identified biochemical connections between forests and the sea.

Although I’m not certain my answer alleviated the student’s concerns, I’ll lead with trees if the question of hope comes up again. However, because of a subsequent encounter with another student’s direct question, my answer will also include a human element.

*CRSP Project Climate Cards are designed as discussion prompts.*

In early April, in collaboration with staff of the Mercer County Conservation District, I was one of two museum educators who spent a morning at that organization’s Munnell Run Farm headquarters assisting teams of local high school students in building climate change background knowledge as preparation for competition in the state-wide Envirothon. As encouragement for full participation in discussions, we relied upon colorful issues-focused information cards that were co-developed with partner organizations during the Climate and Rural Systems Partnership project. The climate cards were effective tools, but in one session a student with deep interest in climate change issues used a direct question to announce her enthusiasm for short cutting the process: “What should I do? I’m sold on all this, so tell me, as a high school student, right now, this month, this year, what should I be doing?”

I advised her to become as well informed as possible about climate change issues so she could better recognize solutions and mitigation efforts, and more effectively represent herself, her school, her family, and her community at relevant hearings or other public meetings. What I couldn’t articulate was that her engaged stance was something I could later point to as a sign of hope.

Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh offers free membership for teens. For additional information please visit the teen membership info page.

Patrick McShea is an educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Hummingbird Lessons

by Patrick McShea

*A male Ruby-throated Hummingbird is handled gently during the banding process.*

Banding hummingbirds is a routine procedure at Powdermill Avian Research Center (PARC). Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are common summer residents throughout western Pennsylvania, including the Ligonier Valley where PARC facilities occupy nearly 25 acres of diverse habitat within Powdermill Nature Reserve, the 2,200-acre field research station of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

During the spring and fall migration seasons, Ruby-throated Hummingbirds are almost always on the top 10 list for highest numbers captured and banded. During the breeding season, they are proportionally represented among the various birds captured. PARC’s ornithologists open fine mesh nets before dawn and check them at regular intervals for several hours afterwards, carefully extracting the birds and bringing them to the lab for data collection, then safely releasing them to the wild without harm.

*Hummingbird bands are so small that the customary nine-digit band number is reduced to five digits with a letter prefix.*

On a Friday morning in late May, the capture, examination, banding, and safe release of one of these tiny, iridescent, long-billed birds was remarkable because of the extra observers involved. Two dozen seventh grade students from West Hempfield Middle School, part of a larger, two-bus contingent participating in a day-long science-focused fieldtrip, were eyewitnesses to the multi-step process.

The wildlife encounter made such a strong collective impression on these students that two hours later, following a working demonstration of the flight tunnel used to evaluate bird-safe window glass, and lunchbreak on the Reserve’s Nature Center grounds, the background chatter of multiple conversations markedly diminished when I mentioned hummingbirds.

“We’ll start our hike shortly,” I announced to the group as they assembled in a forest clearing for the day’s concluding session. “But before we look at some plants along the trail and micro-habitats along the stream, we’re going talk more about hummingbirds.”

As a museum educator I frequently plan group opportunities for the close examination of authentic objects. In the case of the two-inch-long glass tube I then held aloft, an explanation of ground rules for the upcoming examination experience was required. The tube contained the skull of a Ruby-throated Hummingbird, and as I carefully removed the specimen and placed it in the palm of my right hand, I promised the students the same opportunity. “The skull can be safely exchanged by two transfer methods – gently dumping it from your open palm to your neighbor’s, or by picking it up by the beak and carefully placing it in the next person’s palm.”

Our collective sharing was also presented as a group challenge. I concluded the handling instructions with an explanation about how this activity is normally reserved for teachers, rather than students, and the disclosure that with less than a week left in the school year, I considered them as reputably more responsible eighth graders rather than the seventh-grade class listed on the fieldtrip schedule.

After placing the tiny skull in the palm of the student standing closest to me, I outlined for her and the waiting classmates a roughly 10-12 second procedure for an imaginative visual examination of the specimen. “Think about the bird you saw banded this morning. Consider the layers missing from the skull – the feathers, skin, muscles, and other tissues. Note especially, within the bone framework of the skull, the places where the eyes once were, space devoted to this creature’s sense of vision. And finally, before passing the skull to your neighbor, make a mental estimate of the space between the eyes, the nearly translucent bone case that contained the bird’s brain.”

Hand-to-hand circulation of the skull through the student group took a full seven minutes, time I spent relating information about Ruby-throated Hummingbirds from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds website. Important points included how the species’ diet includes far more than nectar, with mosquitoes, gnats, fruit flies, small bees, and spiders being well documented prey items, and how six to ten days of construction work by the female bird results in an inch-deep, two-inch diameter, branch-top nest lined with plant down, held together with spider silk, and for concealment purposes, shingled with lichen chips. Migration was also addressed, with the statement that the hummingbird banded during the morning session might have just returned to western Pennsylvania after a winter spend as far south as Costa Rica.

“My estimate, when I look at the hummingbird skull,” I volunteered, “is that the bird’s brain is the size of a couple grains of rice. What I find amazing is how that tiny brain can steer the bird over or around an enormous obstacle between where we’re standing now and the forests of Costa Rica – the Gulf of Mexico.”

When the hummingbird skull, no worse for a carefully conducted activity’s wear, was safely stowed in my shirt pocket, the trail hike to the edge of Powdermill Run proceeded. A stand of trout lily, the mud chimney of a crayfish burrow, and the distinctive tree cavity chiseled by a Pileated Woodpecker were scenery highlights, but it was a discussion of Powdermill Run’s waters that reinforced the day’s hummingbird theme.

After a streamside question and answer session raised the level of understanding of aquatic food webs, and explanations were shared about how diverse invertebrate lifeforms are indicators of clean water, I brought up the question about where the flow in front of us was heading. Through question and response, one waterway supplying another, we assembled a continent-wide watershed, from Powdermill Run to the Gulf of Mexico, as one student called from the back of the group, “The territory crossed by a migrating hummingbird.”

Patrick McShea is an Educator at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

A Tree Pittsburgh Biocube

by Patrick McShea

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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Turtle-Centered Learning

by Patrick McShea

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Museum Connections to a College Lab

by Patrick McShea

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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Hispanic Heritage Month Scavenger Hunt: Three Birds and a Butterfly

by Patrick McShea

Stop #1: Scarlet Tanager (known in Spanish as Piranga Escarlata)

Stop #2: Monarch Butterfly (known in Spanish as Mariposa Monarca)

Stop #3: Chimney Swift (known in Spanish as Vencejo de Chimenea)

Stop #4: Ruby-throated Hummingbird (known in Spanish as Colibri Gorjirrubi)

Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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We Get Questions: Climate Change, Hope, and Action

by Patrick McShea

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Carnegie Museum of Natural History Blog Citation Information

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Hummingbird Lessons

by Patrick McShea

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