Natural Wonder: An Island Shaped By Water

Natural Wonder: An Island Shaped By Water is an interactive and collaborative experience created in partnership with the Vashon Nature Center. The exhibit shares the wonders of the island’s natural history and explores how all life is intricately connected and shaped by its relationship with the water that surrounds us. Visitors will experience life through the wings, hooves, paws, roots, fins, tentacles, and feet of local species, make connections in our natural ecosystems and reflect on their own place in this great web of life.

Natural Wonder features a wide array of outdoor opportunities to engage in a safe and physically distanced manner, such as the salmon walk, a native plant garden, and an outdoor multimedia exhibit from The Natural History Museum. See below about many of the exciting events planned under the Natural Wonder umbrella.

Visitors to Natural Wonder will enter the "Puget Sound Portal" and experience the journey of a salmon as it returns to its spawning grounds of Shinglemill Creek. After an immersive journey through the waters of the Puget Sound, visitors will emerge into the central special exhibit area, featuring a 12 foot tall cedar tree art piece created by island woodworker Hans Nelsen. The central area will include marine, forest, meadow, and stream sections.

From there, visitors will head to our outside covered area, which will house our shoreline sections. Visitors can then visit the geology section, the native plants garden, and follow a salmon walk through the Museum's back yard.

Finally, visitors will exit the exhibit through a section including a naturalist desk and an area which asks how to re-examine the human relationship to Natural Wonder and the natural world around us.

Vashon Birds: Seen and Heard Up Close

Created by Vashon Audubon, this mini-exhibit runs March 4-April 25. It is an enclosure in the Museum in which visitors can see photographs and hear songs of Vashon birds past, present, and future. The outside walls of the enclosure will display historic Vashon photographs and paintings of Island birds by Island photographer Norman Edson and Island naturalist painter Edmund J. Sawyer.

Homewaters: An Interview with Author David B. Williams

As part of our monthly Museum Talk series, we invited Salish Sea-based author David B. Williams for an insightful discussion on the history of the human and natural history of the Puget Sound. Click here to view the Museum Talk.

Whale People: Protectors of the Sea

Photo credit: The Natural History Museum / Not An Alternative

Whale People: Protectors of the Sea is an outdoor exhibit featuring a 3,000-pound killer whale (orca) totem carved by the House of Tears Carvers of Lummi Nation alongside an immersive IMAX-style film installation that tells the story of environmental emergency through the figure of the orca.

The exhibit was developed by The Natural History Museum, a Vashon-based traveling and pop-up museum led by artists, activists, and scholars, and was on display at the Vashon Heritage Museum during the summer of 2021.

More information about this exhibit: