Event Details

Tuesday, April 27, 2021

6:30 PM

Registration is required for this free event. To register, click on the link below.

Location

Online Webinar

info@wisconsinhistory.org

About the Event

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1000 Islands Environmental Center and Kaukauna Library welcome author Martha Bergland, discussing her new book, The Birdman of Koshkonong. Debra Nowak from 1000 Islands will moderate a Q&A session with the author following her presentation.

Register here to receive a Zoom link to join the conversation. You can also watch the event streaming on the Library and 1000 Island's Facebook page.

Thure Kumlien was one of Wisconsin’s earliest Swedish settlers and an accomplished ornithologist, botanist, and naturalist. He settled on the shore of Lake Koshkonong in 1843 and soon began sending bird specimens to museums and collectors in Europe and the eastern United States, including the Smithsonian. Later, he prepared natural history exhibits for the newly established University of Wisconsin and became the first curator and third employee of the new Milwaukee Public Museum.

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For all of his achievements, Kumlien never gained the widespread notoriety of Wisconsin naturalists John Muir or Aldo Leopold, yet his detailed observations of the Midwest’s natural world were hugely important to the fields of ornithology and botany. As this carefully researched and lovingly rendered biography proves, Thure Kumlien deserves to be remembered as one of Wisconsin’s most influential naturalists.

Martha Bergland is the coauthor, with Paul Hayes, of Studying Wisconsin—a Society Press biography on famed Wisconsin naturalist Increase Lapham, which won the Milwaukee County Historical Society’s Gambrinus Prize. She taught for many years at Milwaukee Area Technical College. She lives in Glendale, Wisconsin.