The Museum received $146,000 through the Museums for America program to develop a Northwoods exhibit.

The Cable Natural History Museum will help residents and visitors of northern Wisconsin to understand the special place where they live and play through designing and installing an exhibition about the Northwoods. Museum staff will engage with an Indigenous consultant, a professional videographer, regional experts, and volunteers from the local community to address feedback from guests desiring to understand the full Northwoods natural history story in a way that centers Indigenous knowledge and experiences. The project will include creating an annual Northwoods exhibit in the museum’s exhibit hall, a permanent exhibit installed in the outdoor classroom, a video available to all local schools, businesses, and organizations, and an online exhibit. These components will further the museum’s mission to connect people to Northwoods nature.

Learn about the Museums for America 2024 funding cycle here. 

The Chequamegon Northwoods Food Coalition Project, led by the Cable Natural History Museum and Cable Community Farm, has been awarded over $38,000 by the Association of Science and Technology Centers through the Cultivating Community Science Stipend program.

Through this effort, the Museum and Farm will develop a regional coalition among community members to ensure a strong local food economy that provides long-term food security encompassing areas within Ashland, Bayfield, and northern Sawyer counties.

Project objectives include:

1. Recruit a coalition of community collaborators – Invite local food growers, producers, sellers, community organizers, nonprofits with food-centered missions, educational institutions, and governmental agencies to participate in development of a community coalition with a commitment to supporting our local food economy.
2. Host educational workshops – Offer a series of educational programs to the community on topics relating to our local food system and long-term food security based upon input from the coalition.
3. Develop a digital resource hub – Create a digital tool or website that will serve as a regional resource hub for food system related maps, directories, and other data.
4. Provide essential resources for growers – Offer opportunities for access to land and tools, education, and other necessities to aspiring and existing farmers/growers to support initiating new food projects.

The Museum received $6,500 through an Environment Grant from the Xcel Energy Foundation to fund our Junior Naturalist and Art of Natural Play programs.

The Junior Naturalist program offers environmental education for children in grades K-6 through games, art, and outdoor exploration. Art of Natural Play offers children ages two to teens, with their families, the opportunity to express themselves artistically through facilitated art projects.

The grant supported these projects with activity supplies, publicity materials, and staff instruction time.

Thanks to the Xcel Energy Foundation for sponsoring these exciting opportunities to bring children and their families closer to nature!

The Museum received a $1,099 grant from the Chequamegon Bay Arts Council to run the Art of Natural Play Program throughout the summer of 2020 at Wayside Wanderings Natural Play area.

The Cable Natural History Museum maintains the Wayside Wanderings Natural Play Area as an off-campus nature space for area visitors and program participants to connect to Northwoods nature through free play experiences.  During the summer, the Museum utilizes the Play Area for a variety of programs, including the Art of Natural Play series which was introduced in 2018.  The Art of Natural Play provides arts and crafts activities for children and their families, utilizing common natural components to tech and bring children in contact with everyday nature.  Programming is provided by local art and Museum volunteer Donna Post.  Activities include making bee houses, anti-collision window sculptures for birds, totem sticks, natural statement jewelry, leaf books, leaf printing, luminary making, pinwheels, paper sculptures and mobiles and many other craft projects involving nature.

We thank the Chequamegon Bay Arts Council for supporting this project. 

The Museum received $5,000 through an Environment Grant from the Xcel Energy Foundation to fund our MuseumMobile Family Days.

MuseumMobile is an outreach program where a Museum Naturalist visits each classroom in grades pre-K through 6 up to three times a year. They teach lessons that explore science and nature through experiments, games, furs, skulls, and more. This program reaches more than 2,000 students in 9 schools annually. This year, with the help of a generous $5,000 grant from the Xcel Energy Foundation, the Museum invited students from the Drummond Elementary School and their families to participate in festival-like Family Days. To help accommodate busy schedules, parents were given a choice between a Saturday morning or a Tuesday evening program.

Parents and students arrived together, often with younger siblings in tow. Students each received a notebook and pen made from recycled materials. Eight volunteers from the community stood ready to help families engage with aging deer jawbones, dissecting goldenrod galls, weaving a food web, feeling ermine fur, sculpting scat from brownies, listening to loon calls, and imitating frog songs. Older students had fun teaching their parents and siblings about MuseumMobile lessons they’ve already experienced. Younger students received an exciting preview of the lessons can look forward to. After learning something at each station, students each earned a BPA-free water bottle.

After a meal of pizza from Coop’s in Hayward, many families stayed to play in the Museum’s Curiosity Center and Bee Amazed exhibit.

Thanks to the Xcel Energy Foundation for sponsoring these exciting events and supporting an opportunity for parents and students to learn together!

The Museum received $5,000 from the Four Cedars Environmental Fund of the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation to fund our “Bee Wonderful” project.

The Bee Wonderful project encompasses exhibit design, exhibit construction, and exhibit-related programming in conjunction with our 2018 main museum exhibit. This 1,000 square foot exhibit engaged visitors in the idea that native bees are amazing creatures who play an invaluable role in our ecosystems and food systems and who need our help.

The Museum has been gardening for pollinators for many years, and we currently maintain a rain garden filled with native plants, a native plant pollinator garden, and a songbird garden. In addition, we partner with the Cable Community Farm by designating one of our interns as a “Pollinator Intern,” who helps maintain and teach about the native pollinator gardens and biodiversity project at the Cable Community Farm.

While exhibit construction, programming, and garden maintenance are normal parts of our operational budget to a certain extent, the Bee Wonderful project goes above and beyond our normal activities. Three exciting opportunities to engage with visitors required extra funding. Those activities include:

• Installing a permanent observation hive for our very own colony of honeybees inside the Museum.
• Hiring Heather Holm (author of two award winning books about native bees and other pollinators of native plants) to consult on the text and design of the exhibit to ensure the highest accuracy and relevancy possible.
• Inviting Heather Holm to give both a free public talk and a hands-on workshop to teach people that native bees are amazing creatures who play an invaluable role in our ecosystems and food systems and who need our help.

The Museum received $1,000 to fund our “Bee Wonderful: Providing Homes for Native Bees” project.

The purpose of this project is to educate the public about concrete actions they can take to conserve and provide habitat for native bees. Native bee populations in the state of Wisconsin have shown marked decline due a myriad of factors including habitat loss, changing climate conditions, and increases in both predator and pest populations. People can directly benefit native bee populations by increasing available habitats. Objectives of this project include building bumblebee and mason bee homes, educating children and adults through programming, and planting a native plant pollinator garden at the Cable Community Farm.

The Museum received a $600 grant from Citizens Natural Resource Association of Wisconsin (http://www.wisconsincnra.org) to fund a summer BioBlitz event. This event gave the public the opportunity to learn from taxonomic experts representative from multiple scientific fields of study. The goal of this day long event was to document all the species we can at one area during one day to give us a “snapshot in time” of the species present.

This was the Museum’s first BioBlitz event and included insects, plants, mushrooms, birds, mammals, and nocturnal insects and birds.

The grant supported the BioBlitz event with equipment, supplies, and lunch and travel for the taxa experts.

The Museum received a $1,500 grant from Xcel Energy Foundation to fund the summer Junior Naturalist program. This program offers environmental education for children in grades K-6 through games, art, and outdoor exploration.

The Junior Naturalists enjoyed catching aquatic insects in the Namekagon River, meeting Carson the Red-tailed Hawk during a bird program, exploring the Cable Community Farm, watching the fish crew from the Wisconsin DNR shock for fish, and even meeting a live Big Brown Bat in a program about nocturnal creatures. Over 90 children were in attendance.

The grant supported the Junior Naturalist program with program supplies, publicity materials, t-shirts, and staff instruction time for two Naturalist Interns that facilitate the program.

The Museum has received significant funds from the St. Croix River Association for the past few summers. In connection with the National Park Service Rangers on the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway, the Museum lead canoe trips for youth entering grades six through nine.

The National Park Service (NPS) provided camping gear. In addition, they provided a NPS Ranger to paddle with the students, and to conduct a campfire program with the students.

The Museum recruited students from the Drummond Area School District and the Hayward Community School District, including the Northern Waters Environmental Charter School within the Hayward Community School District.

Outcomes:

• Students participated in outdoor physical activity that allowed them to experience a local National Scenic Riverway.
• Students learned at least one new skill related to wilderness camping and canoe travel.
• Students challenged themselves physically.
• Most students expressed an interest in repeating the activity for a longer duration or with some other added challenge.
• Students learned something new about the Namekagon River, the National Scenic Riverway, and the importance of protecting water quality.
• Students participated in cooking at least one healthy wilderness meal
• Students burned roughly 413 calories per hour while canoeing for at least four hours per day at a moderate pace, for a total of 1,652 calories burned per day just while canoeing. Source: mycaloriesburned.com.
• Students practiced a set of skills and develop familiarity with outdoor activities that prepare them up for a lifetime of healthy physical activity in the outdoors!

The $1,000 C. D. Besadny grant was given to the Museum to develop a website to accompany the Cable Natural History Museum’s (CNHM) annual exhibit. CNHM’s 2016-17 exhibit theme taught the public about seasonal phenology. This interactive phenology component added to our website allowed Museum staff and the public can post phenological observations. In addition, the grant also supported conservation programming and citizen science initiatives which were completed in conjunction with the exhibit’s phenology theme. This grant helped visitors and residents to apply their knowledge and become stewards of our area and the local environment through multiple forms of exposure to phenology models.

The Museum received $2,000 from the Four Cedars Environmental Fund of the Duluth Superior Area Community Foundation to fund the training of Museum staff in the care and management of captive education raptors.

During October 2015, our Naturalist Curator and Collections Assistant attended the Care and Management of Captive Raptors Training, sponsored by the Raptor Center at the University of Minnesota. The four day workshop oriented bird managers to the details of caring for the maintaining captive raptors for educational purposes.  Training included ways to enhance the Museum’s message through live education animals, raptor anatomy and physiology, basic raptor medical care, behavioral training techniques for education birds, raptor handling and training demonstration for education raptors.