Tuesday, September 11, 2007

No Butterflies, Another Topic!!!!

I know, I know - the butterfly posts were excessive - obsessive, even - so no more for awhile (though I DID see a Polings Hairstreak today!)

So I want to write a bit about something that I get asked about quite a bit. My official Department of the Army job title is "museum specialist," but in the museum world at large, I am what is called the Registrar, another name for the Collections Manager. More about that in a minute, but I am also lucky in that I get to do a broad range of things, including archive work, conservation, curation - really a mixed bag of jobs. But on to the Registrar.

As the Registrar, it is my job to accept and catalog donations. Sounds easy, right? Well, sometimes it's quite simple, other times - not so much. Two examples should suffice.

We recently had the president of the White Sands Club come to us, wanting to donate all of the scrapbooks in their possession to the museum. These 40 books trace the history of the White Sands Officers Wives Club, the White Sands Wives Club, and the White Sands Enlisted Wives Club, going back to the early 1950's. Really interesting, and important, because, while we have a lot of materials dealing with the military and testing at White Sands, materials relating to the social history of the range, such as what the military and their families did off-duty, is difficult to come by. This is an easy collection - it relates to our storyline and is obviously WSMR-related.

Thursday morning I will be picking up quite a different collection here in Las Cruces. The daughter of a rocket scientist (yes, they really exist!) is donating her father's materials - boxes of stuff. Her father worked on the Apollo and Saturn programs for NASA, in addition to working as an engineer on early Space Shuttle development. Oh yeah, and he worked with and for Dr. Werner von Braun - an icon of rocketry and one of the German Paperclip Scientists who came over after the Second World War. So how does this relate to White Sands? I don't really know yet, as I have not seen the collection. My job will be to take the donation, go through it all, determine what should be housed in our archive, and what should be sent to the archive at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, where her father actually spent his career.

Two very different collections, and two very different ways to accession and process them. I also get asked, a lot more than I expected, what a typical day for me is. Well, the typical day is atypical - never the same! Which, when you really think about it, is not a bad job to have.

Upon arriving at 0700, I usually get the lights on - open the museum - then sit down with my boss and just visit for an hour. I might then take a walk around Missile Park or the Nature Trail. If a group is coming in, I might have to lead a tour, or just talk to visitors. Being an Army museum, there is always training - safety, health, anti-terrorism - all things that most museums don't really have to deal with. I might call in work orders for things that aren't quite right in the museum - leaking roofs, pests, that sort of thing. I might have to accept a donation of photographs or oscilloscopes, magazines and books or warheads! The other day, the Director and I rearranged the artifacts in storage. During a recent 100% inventory, we realized the artifacts were stored in no logical fashion, and fixed it!

Then there are the inquiries - email, snail mail or in person. "Did Clyde Tombaugh really work out here?", "Did the Army really fire a rocket into Juarez, Mexico?", "Does the Navy really have a ship in the desert?" Yes, to all (well, sort of!) You get the idea.

Each day is different and unique - that's what makes the job so enjoyable. Plus, I get to spend my lunch hours hiking in the desert. I think I'll stay awhile!

Monday, September 10, 2007

Butterflies, Moths, and More!

Here is a photo from today of the arroyo just north of the museum, mentioned in Liss's blog here.


And one of our little museum visitors, a Desert Cottontail - about the size of a softball!
Now on to the bugs!!!!

On her blog, here, Liss showed photos of some of the butterflies we found at Dripping Springs on Friday. For anyone interested in what they were, here they are again. In addition to these, we saw a California Sister - another first for us. Liss had mentioned that there were some attracted to, well, let's call it "waste!" The first and second photos are of the butterflies on that stuff:



A Bordered Patch


Ceraunus Blue (a new one for me)


Gray Hairstreak on a Russian Thistle (Tumbleweed)


Mexican Yellow on Liatris (another new one)


Also, I have been trying to photograph the moths that show up at night on the back patio. Like most folks, I never paid them much attention until I began to take their pictures, at which point I realized that they can be quite colorful in their own right. Here are a few, but I have no names.






Back to the desert, I went on my lunchtime walk today behind the White Sands Missile Range Golf Course; I guess it was Skipper Day today because they seemed to be out in force. Below is the view to the mountains (west) from the puddling location I wrote about here:

I had been a little concerned about whether I would even be able to go out, as the mountains looked like this earlier in the day:


It rained all night and seemed like it was going to start again, but the clouds became patchy by lunchtime. The streambed was damp but there were no butterflies puddling. I should have known, after all, the whole desert was damp! I did see one Painted Lady there, though, as well as a few Queens. I made my way back to my truck along the diversion dam behind the golf course and began to run into a lot of butterflies. They were all between the dam and the desert scrub, in this area:


In addition to Common/White Checkered Skippers, Fiery Skippers, and Common Sootywings, there were these guys:

Golden-Headed Sootywings (dozens of them!)

Acacia Skipper

Dotted Roadside Skipper


Also putting in appearances today were Variegated Fritillary, Red Admiral, Bordered Patch, Checkered White, Northern Cloudywing, Sleepy Orange, and Dainty Orange.


All in all, a good day!