By Bosco Schell

Photo by Zandria Oliver

Where should you go to see a close up of the difference between a gray squirrel and a flying squirrel, the wingspan of a red-tail hawk, and the nest of a Baltimore oriole? To the Pease Museum of Natural History at the Douglas Library in North Canaan. 

In the library’s airy ground floor in a white clapboard building on Main Street, neatly arranged books dominate. Head up the stairs in the back, and suddenly you are in a world of warblers and wood mammals, butterflies and hummingbirds, raptors and reptiles, all beautifully mounted in glass cases and on the walls. 

Charles H. Pease (1867-1953), a prominent local printer and publisher, wrote in his diary that around 1892 he came upon the colorful remains of a red-winged blackbird and decided he needed to preserve it. He found a taxidermy text and was off with a new hobby. “My collection grew until I had more than 100 specimens,” he wrote. To house them he made a deal with the town fathers in 1925: if they built an upper story on the addition for the new library building, he would give his collection to a natural history museum, on condition it accepted donations from others. And so, the museum grew.

Says librarian Norma DeMay: “Today school classes come to study it, artists make sketches. It is a unique representation of local fauna.” —douglaslibrarycanaan.org