Make your own Victorian-style natural collection display case
Kids have a great curiosity for bugs—both crawling and long dead. Empty shells and the polished bones of various creatures are equally fascinating. Here are two simple ways to fuel your child’s enthusiasm and help the whole family learn more about the natural world
ABOVE PHOTO: juhansonin via Flickr
Bug love
“My three-year-old has been fascinated by insects for a long time,” says photographer Megan Cumberpatch. “At kindy I’d find him lying on the ground following trails of ants. Insects weren’t really my thing, but I’ve tried hard not to let that affect him, and in the process I’ve become a whole lot braver. This summer we converted our old goldfish bowl into an insect house—‘Bug Hotel’ is what we call it. It has soil, a couple of sticks and a piece of mesh on the top. So far it’s been home to spiders, caterpillars, moths, flies, crickets and praying mantises.
“We’ve watched a female praying mantis eat a male and right now there’s a large praying mantis egg case in there. My son had brought in a heavily pregnant praying mantis and the next morning she’d laid this funny looking thing. All the books say that it’ll hatch in spring which is quite a long time to wait. We let her go after a day or two and later caught one of our crickets trying to eat the egg case. It was really amazing when two of the caterpillars staying in Bug Hotel burrowed into the soil to pupate and then appeared as moths a couple of weeks later.”
Collectormania
There’s something very aesthetically pleasing about collections of stuff from nature. The Victorians knew this—they were particularly zealous collectors, lining their walls with stuffed animals, pressing botanical samples in notebooks and displaying fossils and other trophies in lovely wooden cases. Pteridomania, or Fern Madness is the term for just one of their collecting crazes.
Tragically, the Victorian zeal for collecting contributed to the dramatic reduction, even the complete extinction, of numerous rare plant and animal species in the wild. With this in mind, a guiding rule for my son Theodore’s collection is to only collect bugs that are already dead, unless we know them to be pests. Other curios—great grandpa’s ancient sunglasses, a vintage military button found in the garden, baby teeth, even a dinosaur bone generously donated by a friend—have also been added to his collection.
Start a collection of interesting bugs, shells and bones and you’ll soon be needing a wall cabinet to store and display them.
Boxing it
- Find a shallow wooden wine box and empty it of its contents. (This is the hard part!)
- Remove the wooden lid and get a glazier to cut a piece of glass to fit. Cost: approximately $15 for a sheet of glass, 600mm x 250mm.
- Paint the box a dark colour. We’ve used Resene’s water-based Black Pepper Wood Stain from the Environmental Choice range. If using stain you may need several coats for a solid colour. A 250ml pot contains plenty for this. Once dry, mount box directly onto the wall using at least four strong screws.
- Start collecting whatever your kids find most fascinating. When we find a new bug, we identify it by searching Google Images for a match. Once we know the bug’s name we can find other details. Is it native to New Zealand? Is it a pest? What does it eat? Print out the information, glue it to a small card and attach bug using pins or double-sided tape.
