James McAndrews Jr.: Valley Riparian exhibit grows at new museum

The San Joaquin Valley is a large grassland region, but cutting across it are rivers that flow from the Sierra Nevada. Along those rivers, in areas known as Valley riparian habitats, one can find a wide variety of flora and fauna.

According to Great Valley Museum Director Arnold Chavez, the “vegetation along the river can become dense and tall. Riparian forests are sometimes similar to tropical forests, with a tall overstory of trees and understory of shrubs, herbs and hanging vines.”

In the early incarnation of the Great Valley Museum, a Valley riparian display was available for local students to study the types of life found there. Today the new GVM has a significantly larger and more detailed display of a Valley riparian habitat at its new home in the Science Community Center on the Modesto Junior College West Campus.

The old museum was located at College and Stoddard avenues, in a site that had served as a bookstore and chili shop. That museum was too cramped to allow large displays of habitats, so the Valley riparian display is a very narrow one – 3 feet wide, 2 feet deep and 6 feet high. Behind a Plexiglas display, it shows some of the animal and plant life found there. Climbing up the riverbank of the display is a small beaver – anything larger would have overwhelmed the display. Among the other animals is a belted kingfisher – a bird whose diet consists, oddly enough, of fish. Also visible is a cliff swallow, a variety known for its yearly return to Mission San Juan Capistrano.

The new display – 24 feet long, 20 feet wide and 3 feet tall – has taken several years to put together and will be finished during MJC’s spring break.

Arnold says the new display will give the visitor “a broader view of what a riparian looks like. The old one was a compact display, and this one allows the visitor to walk around it to see it from many angles.” On the south side of the display is a beaver dam.

According to museum traveling teacher Loralee Crawford, the dam is 15 feet long and has so far taken 250 man-hours to get it to its present state. It will be one of the areas worked on during spring break.

Climbing up the dam is a large adult beaver that, it might be added, had nothing to do with the cutting of the trees that make up this dam. Originally, the plan had been for the limbs to be worked on by people to make it appear a beaver had cut the piece of wood down. Not satisfied with the results, Michael Hartless and his son Aaron collected limbs from a beaver dam by their house that had been cut by beavers.

Once gathered, these more realistic limbs were incorporated into the dam visitors now see.

Visiting students often ask if the habitat uses real water. It doesn’t. The realistic look is achieved with “two-part” epoxy that covers almost the entire bottom surface of the display. For added realism, the “water” also has ripples, achieved when Loralee and Michael discovered a technique for putting waves in the display by using their fingers to create them just before the epoxy dried but while it could hold the ripples in what Loralee says was a “process never done before in this type of application.” Among the birds, one can see cinnamon teals and several belted kingfishers, one of which is fluttering its wings as it lands. Monofilaments are used to make the bird appear to be flying.

Even though the display is undergoing its final touches, the public is still welcome to come by the museum and see the large display – as well as the old, smaller display – at the Great Valley Museum.

This story was originally published March 10, 2016 at 5:06 PM with the headline "James McAndrews Jr.: Valley Riparian exhibit grows at new museum."