Night at the Manitoba Museum: 17th century ship and far-travelling cougar
Posted February 19, 2025 9:48 am.
Come with CityNews to spend a night at the Manitoba Museum.
This museum was opened by Queen Elizabeth II in the summer of 1970.
Now nearly 55 years later, it remains a staple in the province. Just ask Dorata Blumczyńska, the museum’s CEO.
“The Manitoba Museum is not just a provincial treasure, this is a Canadian treasure,” said Blumczyńska. “It’s an incredibly immersive space. It’s a space that invites you to live into history, to have a conversation in history with history.”
NONSUCH GALLERY
The tour begins in the Nunsuch Gallery, where visitors are immediately welcomed by what looks very much like… a pirate ship.
“It is not a pirate ship, although I know that’s a very favourite thing of little visitors to say,” explained Blumczyńska. “It’s a fantastic artifact, the largest in fact in the museum, and it is an exploratory ship.”
The Nonsuch was built as a merchant ship in 1650. Roughly two decades later it sailed from England to trade for furs in Hudson Bay.
Visitors can hear voices in the gallery, those of villagers from the time.
“They are merchants and peddlers, and they are people kind of working on the banks of England, and they are receiving the cargo that’s coming in and it’s entering the British economy,” Blumczyńska said.
THE COUGAR – MANITOBA’S BIG CAT
A cougar named SK10, aptly named because it was born in Saskatchewan’s Cypress Hills in 2010, is the newest addition to the Manitoba Museum.
“Shortly after (the cougar) was born, about a year or so after, it was given this collar,” said the museum’s curator of zoology Dr. Randall Mooi. “This is a satellite-tracking collar, and an ear tag. And so we were able to follow it, or at least the researchers were able to follow it. They were researchers from the University of Alberta, looking at movements of cougars in their natural habitat.
“Just before it was about two years old or so, it left its mother’s home range to strike out on its own.
“They tracked it … Went across the border into Montana, went through Montana for a while, then came back up into Saskatchewan and stopped in Moose Mountain Provincial Park. That’s when the collar actually stopped working. We thought we had lost it forever, but just a few years later, around 2016 or so, it was picked up on trail cameras in Riding Mountain National Park.”
In 2020, researchers discovered SK10 was accidentally caught in a legal coyote snare. With the help of Manitoba Conservation and the Assiniboine Park Zoo, the teams were able to preserve the cougar’s body and skeleton for the exhibit.
It was a long process to create everything in the exhibit from scratch, but the team says it had a lot of fun putting it together.
“This is cougar scat, or at least a copy of cougar scat,” Mooi explained of the molds found in the exhibit. “It’s not the actual stuff. So we had a mold made of materials that looks like cougar scat, but it’s just a sort of brown form. So we had a little bit of fun with it. We had a cougar poop competition among a bunch of us.
“Some people at the museum decided, they even came up with a little chart and to decide which one looked the best.”
The “Manitoba’s Big Cat” exhibit allows for a better understanding of cougars in the province, and shares the animal’s story with the public.
“It’s an animal that people don’t generally associate with Manitoba but it’s probably been here for thousands of years,” said Mooi. “Even though we haven’t had any physical evidence of it until the 1970s.
“They tell a fantastic story. And this one was really special because it had been radio-collared, so we knew a lot more about it. So we wanted to be able to present that to our visitors and let them know that cougars are an important part of the ecology of Manitoba.”
CityNews Connect: A Night at the Manitoba Museum
