Natural History Collector: Hunt, Discover, Learn!: Expert Tips on how to care for and display your collections and turn your room into a cabinet of curiosities

Loaded with hands-on, kid-friendly projects, Natural History Collector: Hunt, Discover, Learn! will teach budding nature collectors techniques for cleaning, caring for, and displaying discovered treasures.

Coming home from the beach or a walk in the woods with a fine collection of rocks, shells, pine cones, and seed pods is easy. The trick is knowing what to do with them once you get them back to your room. The real fun comes from identifying, preserving, and displaying your treasures!

Natural History Collector: Hunt, Discover, Learn! is full of hands-on, kid-friendly projects for the budding naturalist. The opening chapter introduces kids to different ways of creating their personal field guides for keeping track of what they see, when and where they see it, and what makes it interesting. They’ll move on to techniques for cleaning and caringfor treasures, such as drying flowers, pressing leaves, and desalinizing rocks and shells.

The book’s drawings and photographs will help kids discover what to look for when they examine feathers, seeds, and minerals (and recognize the difference between sedimentary, igneous, and metamorphic). Extra projects focus on display; making shadow boxes, creating collectors’ cases from egg cartons and candy boxes, labeling, hanging, and mounting collections.

Michael Sanchez is an educator at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science in Albuquerque. He became interested in nature, "bugs", seashells, and dinosaurs from a very early age and went on to get a degree in biological anthropology from the University of New Mexico. Mike loves to share his passion for the wonders of nature with people of all ages. His hobbies include collecting seashells, drawing, and scuba diving. He and his wife have two grown children and share their home in Albuquerque with a really big dog named Tripp.