Whale of a gift from the people of P.E.I.

ERIK KLASSEN
Commentary as published in The Guardian - May 23, 2008

It was certainly surprising to read Mike Currie’s comments as quoted in the article ‘Dead blue whale a ‘national treasure’ (The Guardian, May 17, 2008), particularly when, at the time he was first told of the upcoming project over a month ago, he expressed little concern and his present concerns would seem to be the result of realizing the amount of media coverage the project was receiving.

Regrettably his view is based on few facts and even less prescience. In 1987, when the whale washed ashore, its burial was paid for by the national Museum of Nature in Ottawa on the condition that it would be able to reclaim the skeleton at some future time. Had this not happened the whale would almost certainly have been cut into pieces and disposed of at sea.

Subsequently the Museum of Nature concluded that its current premises weren’t large enough to contain the skeleton and an agreement was reached with the Museum of Nature and the province of Prince Edward Island for the skeleton to be displayed in a $3-million atrium at the $50-million Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Research Centre, currently under construction at the University of British Columbia.

The skeleton of the blue whale will be prominently attributed as being a gift of the people of P.E.I. where it will be seen by thousands of people and will generate continuing and invaluable publicity for the Island. Also overlooked by Mr. Currie is that one of the major activities of the Beaty Biodiversity Research Centre is marine conservation, the importance of which to coastal provinces such as P.E.I. can hardly be overemphasized.

Since the considerable skills needed to repair the broken bones, replicate any missing parts and articulate the skeleton exist at the University of British Columbia but in relatively few other places in Canada, Mr. Currie’s suggestion that the skeleton be kept here is disingenuous as he does not address who would pay the minimum $1-million cost to prepare and display the skeleton even if it was exhibited in a concrete block warehouse or storage building.

For Mr. Currie, rather than focus on the significant benefits that will accrue to P.E.I. from the project, to suggest that the skeleton should be used as a minor local tourist attraction seems somewhat shortsighted under the circumstances. Fortunately the writer has yet to run into anyone who shares Mr. Currie’s rather parochial view.

Erik Klassen of Charlottetown is a volunteer for infrastructure and fundraising for the University of British Columbia’s Beaty Biodiversity Research Centre.

Exporting our heritage

LETTER OF THE DAY as published by The Guardian - May 20, 2008

Editor:

As we watch the drama unfold near Tignish to transport the bones of a blue whale to become the centrepiece of the University of British Columbia's new Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Research Centre, we learn of what an amazing creature is leaving this Island.

While this example of the largest animal that have ever lived on Earth, is being prepared for its trip west, I am saddened that once again we are silently surrendering a piece of our precious heritage to those who appreciate the educational value of this spectacular creature.

Four years before this whale was buried, the P.E.I. legislature passed the Museum Act giving a clear mandate in natural history to our provincial museum, known as the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation. Sadly, this natural history mandate has seen as much daylight as our unfortunate friend, the blue whale, over the last two decades.

One would hope that the current government, which was elected with a clear commitment to provincial museum development, will soon be articulating a vision on how this mandate will unfold. The Island Heritage Study conducted by The IRIS Group for government will soon be released and we can only hope that this study will also help in setting a future direction.

It was the Daily Examiner of Feb. 28, 1883, that reported on the ancient reptile fossil discovered by Benjamin McLeod while digging a well in New London. Identified by Francis Bain as Bathygnathus borealis, the rare fossil was sent to the Museum of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, which like UBC today, cared enough to ensure the precious item would help educate both the public and researchers.

Hopefully the endless donation of prize parts of our heritage to collections elsewhere will cease as the full mandate of our provincial museum becomes a reality and and not a just a hopeful wish of our legislature.

Ian Scott,

former executive director of the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundatio

Piecing blue whale skeleton back together will take some time

ERIC MCCARTHY
Transcontinental Media

as published by The Guardian, May 16, 2008

NORWAY — Not even a coating of Vicks or Tiger Balm in the nostrils will prepare diggers for the stench of a rotting blue whale.

“When the smell gets too bad, you’ll have to get out and go upwind from it for a while,” says skeleton articulator Mike deRoos.

DeRoos is in Norway, near Tignish, helping prepare for the recovery of bones from the skeleton of a blue whale, which has been buried there for nearly 21 years.

Once all the bones have been washed, packaged and shipped to British Columbia, it will be deRoos’ job to piece them back together so the skeleton can be put on display in the atrium of the University of British Columbia’s new Beaty Biodiversity Museum and Research Centre. DeRoos is confident the skeleton will be a great teaching tool for UBC and a great draw to the museum.
He said the university is taking possession just in time, suggesting the whale would be unsalvageable if left in the ground much longer.

There will be broken bones in the carcass, deRoos said. Some would have broken when the whale washed ashore. Moving it to its burial spot would have damaged some bones, too, and the animal’s crushing weight would have caused damage.

“The skeleton is designed to swim in the ocean,” he explained, not to support its weight on land.
DeRoos is part of UBC’s 10-member team that will co-ordinate the recovery of the bones in a project that’s expected to wrap up by next Friday. It will take some time until the bones are put back together and are on display.

“If we’re really lucky, probably a year and a half.”

Before deRoos starts piecing the bones together, he’ll have to soak each individual piece in enzymes to extract the whale grease, and then bleach the bones in sunlight.

Also on site is Mark Halpan, an artist and contractor. It will be his job to repair broken bones and replace missing pieces with Plaster of Paris or hydrastone.

Mammoth whale being dug up at Nail Pond

photo taken Nov 1998

As published by The Guardian - May 15, 2008

NIGEL ARMSTRONG
The Guardian

A whale of a story is unfolding in West Prince as the world’s largest creature gets uncovered at Nail Pond and prepared for transport from one coast of Canada to the other.

Big is the least of the superlatives applicable to the project being called the big dig by some.

A blue whale washed ashore northwest of Tignish in November 1987 and was buried in the sand nearby. Now the University of British Columbia wants to display the skeleton at a new museum on its campus.

Canada does not have a blue whale skeleton on display and there are only 17 of them around the world, four in the United States.

A team from UBC led by Andrew Trites is at Nail Pond this week to carry the Canadian project forward. Helping them are some 30 volunteer staff and students from the University of Prince Edward Island plus volunteer students from Holland College.

Digging with an excavator starts today and there will be much holding of breath, both figurative and literal.

When Trites did an exploratory dig this past December he found the body surprisingly preserved, almost mummified, with skin still wrapped around blubber on the monster animal. That was for the part above the water table.

Trites is not certain what the condition of the remains will be like below the water level at the site located in the sand not far from the water’s edge.

“We still have a bit of anxiety,” Trites said during a public presentation on the project Wednesday in Charlottetown.

Not even the biggest dinosaur could equal the blue whale for length and weight. The whale’s tongue weighs as much as an elephant. It heart is as big as a car and a baby could crawl through parts of its arteries.

Trites had list after list of extraordinary dimensions and degrees associated with the endangered blue whale. It dives some 200 to 300 metres below the sea to feed by plunging its gaping mouth towards swarms of tiny krill.

It stays below for some five to 15 minutes, holding its breath and when it comes to the surface, an awestruck “thar’ she blows” would hardly do the event justice.

Out of two nostrils, also big enough for that baby to crawl through, a jet of oily-stench air is thrust some three stories high as the animal recovers and cleanses its blood, anxious to get down below in the relentless pursuit of its 10,000 pounds of food per day.

“Not only does (that air) smell really bad, but it’s oily as well so droplets stick to you,” said Trites. “They have really bad breath.”

The oil and smell is going to be a big challenge for the team on P.E.I.

“This past December when I was here I was touching the bones with my hands and I forgot and held up my camera up to get a picture,” said Trites. “My camera still smells . . . but in a good way.”

The public is welcome to come watch the Nail Pond excavation, which should see the whole carcass uncovered by Saturday, but Trites warns onlookers to be careful.

“You don’t want to get into that goo,” he said of the decomposing liquefied blubber, water and sand at the pit.

Trites said the team’s clothing will be destroyed at the end of the dig.
He expects the uncovering will take about two days, followed by three days to cut up and record the remains.

“The whole crew will be slicing and dicing by Saturday,” predicts Trites.

The team even includes three people whose sole job is sharpening knives. Then there is the tagger with some 1,000 tags for identification, the photographer for every big or tiny piece and the film crew from Discovery Channel that is following the whole project through.

The team brought a mammoth chain saw from B.C. to help slice the skull in half.

That is required to get inside to clean it out and support it for transport, said Trites.
Once dug up, cut up and recorded, the whale parts will be packed into a container and transported across Canada by rail, free of charge courtesy of CN Rail, said Trites.

To follow the progress of that journey, just follow the seagulls, he quipped.

His team also received free transport courtesy of WestJet which donated airfare to the project.
Also making a donation was a real estate development company in B.C. which donated space in Victoria where the bones will be arranged, repaired and assembled in what Trites called “major reconstruction.”

That is, after the bones have been de-greased.

“That will be our next big challenge,” said Trites.

The team explored an offer from a helicopter cleaning company but its tubs of degreaser were not big enough, it turned out. Now the team is going to try a fairly new technique of immersing the bones in vats contained an enzyme that purports to digest oil.

The goal is to suspend and display the skeleton by the fall of 2009 in an all-glass atrium above the stairs leading down to the underground Beaty Biodiversity Museum at UBC. The Beaty will house some 2 million specimens now in the care of UBC but spread around the campus in storage.

Submission to Island Heritage Study

By - PEI Advisory Council on the Status of Women

This full submission is available. A summation of the key recommendations is included here:

"We know that many ideas and priorities have come out of the province-wide public consultations already. The following are the kinds of initiatives and investments that the Advisory Council on the Status of Women would strongly endorse.

Shorter-term projects:

• Investment in public art in public spaces by women and men. This should include creation of public monuments and memorials that focus on women's history.
• Increased investment in contemporary arts and culture. This should include increased support for existing institutions, such as the PEI Council of the Arts, and initiatives, such as the craft Buyers' Markets, that provide grants to artists and artisans and that assist them in making a livable income from their work.
• Multi-year, stable provincial government support for local publishing projects that illuminate our small Island's past and our contemporary circumstances in non-fiction, fiction, and poetry for adults and for children.
• Specific support for arts programs and arts presence in the schools — including supports for arts educators (many of whom are women), for supplies and space, and for artists-in-the schools — to give Island young people maximum inspiration to apply their creativity.
• Support for doing and debating inclusive historicals research in academia and in the wider community.
• Investment in sustainable and beautiful affordable housing — creating heritage buildings for tomorrow that make people's lives better today.

Longer-term projects:

• A provincial museum, supported by a well-maintained and well-staffed artifactory, in a location designed to benefit local people first and to tourists second. This is needed notwithstanding the value and quality of the seven provincial museum sites and should be an addition to, not a replacement of, these sites.
• Consideration of the role and value of a maintaining a specialized focus in part of or all of a provincial museum. Groups advocating for a children's museum have insight into what benefits this could bring, as do proponents of a museum of natural history. (Either or both of these focuses could merit — or even require — an independent museum site, and this is well worth exploring.)
• A provincial art gallery to collect and exhibit arts and crafts from the Island's past and present."

Our natural history: a neglected part of our heritage

BY DWAINE OAKLEY
Guest opinion as published by The Guardian March 15, 2008

The Natural History Society of Prince Edward Island would like to see more focus on the Island’s natural history as the IRIS group moves forward in understanding and making recommendations on heritage in Prince Edward Island.

There is a massive natural history component to Prince Edward Island that has largely been neglected to date. The Natural History Society of P.E.I. would like to ensure that any future recommendations that the IRIS group comes up with include this neglected aspect of our heritage.

The society commends the achievements by the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation and community museums, despite their lack of resources, for their performance in the delivery of various parts of the conservation of our cultural history. However, the mandate of the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation is to study, collect, preserve, interpret, and protect the human and natural heritage of Prince Edward Island for the use, benefit and enjoyment of the people of the province.

In the past, the P.E.I. Natural History Society of 1889-1903 pressured the government to establish a provincial museum of natural history, with its efforts culminating in a 1901 petition signed by 131 of the more prominent and influential citizens of the day. It is high time that a natural history museum be developed on P.E.I. as part of the museum and heritage system.

This natural history museum must have a dedicated curator and support staff to conduct systematic collecting of specimens, and a mandate to deliver educational programs to school, college, and university students and faculty, Islanders and tourists. This museum must have an appropriate structure to tell our Island’s natural history from its formation to the present day. In addition, this facility should ideally be located where it has representative habitats adjacent to the museum, so that the past can be tied to present habitats.

The delivery of the government’s natural history mandate must address methods to encourage citizen participation in biological surveys (online citizen science data collection systems), improve the identification skills of Islanders and visitors, and conserve unique and rare habitats and species.

Many of the Society’s members attended the various focus groups around the Island, and have been commenting on an individual basis on the IRIS group’s website blog. It is hoped that the interest in this aspect of our heritage is shared by all Islanders and that we will soon see the natural history of P.E.I. on display for all to see.

BY DWAINE OAKLEY

The Natural History Society of Prince Edward Island would like to see more focus on the Island’s natural history as the IRIS group moves forward in understanding and making recommendations on heritage in Prince Edward Island.

There is a massive natural history component to Prince Edward Island that has largely been neglected to date. The Natural History Society of P.E.I. would like to ensure that any future recommendations that the IRIS group comes up with include this neglected aspect of our heritage.

The society commends the achievements by the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation and community museums, despite their lack of resources, for their performance in the delivery of various parts of the conservation of our cultural history. However, the mandate of the P.E.I. Museum and Heritage Foundation is to study, collect, preserve, interpret, and protect the human and natural heritage of Prince Edward Island for the use, benefit and enjoyment of the people of the province.

In the past, the P.E.I. Natural History Society of 18891903 pressured the government to establish a provincial museum of natural history, with its efforts culminating in a 1901 petition signed by 131 of the more prominent and influential citizens of the day. It is high time that a natural history museum be developed on P.E.I. as part of the museum and heritage system.

This natural history museum must have a dedicated curator and support staff to conduct systematic collecting of specimens, and a mandate to deliver educational programs to school, college, and university students and faculty, Islanders and tourists. This museum must have an appropriate structure to tell our Island’s natural history from its formation to the present day. In addition, this facility should ideally be located where it has representative habitats adjacent to the museum, so that the past can be tied to present habitats.

The delivery of the government’s natural history mandate must address methods to encourage citizen participation in biological surveys (online citizen science data collection systems), improve the identification skills of Islanders and visitors, and conserve unique and rare habitats and species.

Many of the Society’s members attended the various focus groups around the Island, and have been commenting on an individual basis on the IRIS group’s website blog. It is hoped that the interest in this aspect of our heritage is shared by all Islanders and that we will soon see the natural history of P.E.I. on display for all to see.

Whale bones can't stay in P.E.I.: museum official

As published by CBC.ca news Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Prince Edward Island does not have the resources to keep and display a blue whale skeleton that will instead go to British Columbia, says the director of the provincial museum foundation.

The whale washed ashore near Tignish in western P.E.I. in 1987 and was buried nearby. Representatives of a new biodiversity centre at the University of British Columbia recently exhumed part of the whale to assess its condition. They will return in the spring to complete the exhumation and prepare the bones for shipping to the west coast.

There's no place on the Island to display such a large mammal, David Keenlyside, director of the P.E.I Museum and Heritage Foundation, told CBC News Tuesday.

"It's always disappointing when you can't keep your heritage at home," he said.

"But you can't save everything, and you just have to plan for these things. It's a logistic challenge, for sure, given the weight and size of it. I'm just happy that it found a good home."

Although the province has no immediate plans for a provincial heritage museum, Keenlyside said he'd like to see the government create a facility capable of displaying the bones of large mammals.