Popcorn Bags

A lot of our equipment has come to us through the decades by chance or good fortune. In 1983 the Herpetology and other sections of the National Museum shared the 1501 Carling Avenue Beamish Building in Ottawa,  (which had been the warehouse of the failing chain of Beamish Stores) with some general storage warehousing. 

An old Jewish janitor, with the thriftiness traditionally ascribed to his ethnicity, was reluctant to follow orders to pitch boxes of popcorn bags from a failed "Canadian Heritage Food" enterprise (which had evidently splurged too much of its startup capital on these wonderful bags) into the dumpster, and repeatedly urged the museum staff to make use of them. The late Mike Rankin (as thrifty as a Scottish background is supposed to make one) accepted several of these boxes, and dispersed them among Herpetology, Ichthyology, and us. We have since then inherited the museum's stock of popcorn bags. 
We seem, continuing to take the ethnic angle, to have inherited the thrifty side of our Connecticut Yankee/prairies-during-the-Depression cultural heritage, and these 8,000 orange & yellow 7-litre "popcorn/maïs soufflé" bags have been a central feature of our household ever since. They hold whatever kind of food we need to freeze, packed dry Beans and grains to Haida Gwaii and back in 1985-1986, protect important documents & illustrations from scattering and dampness, provided clean, inflatable containersfor soaking large pieces of watercolour paper prior to stretching, and are our primary collecting containers for most kinds of organisms. Just last night, after a meeting, Fred was offered a 2-litre box of milk, and in order to carry it to our rendezvous, he slid it into a popcorn bag from his pack, and was able to carry it across Kemptville without any danger that it would spill.

By the summer of 1984 they were being used as nurseries for pregnant Water Snakes under our Behemoth van at the Tobermory Village, we sacrificed many of them to the dividing-up parties of the Bishops Mills Food Co-op, and whenever we want to leave messages to each other in the field, the origin of note is clearly indicated by being contained in the orange & yellow of a popcorn bag.

Popcorn bags are so central to our field work that we hardly remember what it was like - 33 years ago now - before they came on the scene. To start with the largest piece of equipment they've displaced, our big hand-made vasculum is a family memento now, not field equipment, because any plant specimen that will fit on an herbarium sheet will also fit into a popcorn bag, and if it needs to be treated delicately, the bag can be inflated and tied off.

The chorus of a herpetological song Fred wrote in 1981...

With their dipnets & headlamps & snakebags & all,

They’re sure to crawl out in the spring, that’s the time,

With the mud in their boots as they fall in the bog,

Which they’re bound to get over in time.

...is the only memory of the canvas snake bag, which came in diverse sizes and was clumsily closed by fabric ties, or replaced by a pillowcase tied off with a Grapefruit-sized knot. These cloth bags were accompanied by pocket-bulging glass jars to hold creatures that wouldn't do well in fabric.

Now all that is replaced in our collecting protocol by popcorn bags, as described in How to do a Bridge and here's an exerpt of the original:

At the bridge, park safely and note the time of arrival. Then hop out of the vehicle for a general overview, and to take a GPS reading in the middle of the road at mid-span. Scan the road and shoulders for road-killed remains -- fresh, desiccated, or skeletal -- [stashing those that are to be retained in popcorn bags]...

Inspect the shores for sites where drifted shells may have accumulated... scoop the richest handfuls into a plastic bag, insert a tag bearing a unique identifier, and tie it closed.

Before entering the water... be sure every member of the party has multiple bags. As you find things (Molluscs, Crayfish, and beasts with too many legs to not be interesting), you place them in your plastic bag. The trick with a bag is not to drop it, not to tear it on branches, and not to let the pendulum of accumulated material impede the capture stroke of your net. Usually you just hold it against the net handle, but as it fills you may want to tie a loose knot and tuck it under your belt (or very securely into a pocket), or leave it conspicuously on the shore until your return. If Mollusc shells are concentrated on the bottom (sometimes as a deposit of amazingly low-density sediment), you'll also want to sample this submerged drift into a bag.

Once you feel like you've sampled all the habitat that's vulnerable to this kind of study... put the botanical specimens in the plant press that you did remember to put into the vehicle, or take them home in a cooler, or at least shaded from the sun in tied-off inflated bags... Then you store the bags, pack the nets, get in the vehicle, and move on -- to the next site, or to home.

At home, all the bags and plants are checked for labels, and the drift and shells go into the freezer for 48 hours, to kill anything that might crawl between samples while they're drying. Put the plants in the press that you forgot to bring in the vehicle. A couple of days later, thaw the samples, spread each to dry thoroughly in a newspaper-lined shallow box, and then store bulk samples in plastic bags or high-density polyethylene wide-mouth jars until they can be studied.

When the museum moved to restricted quarters in 1995-1996, we accepted the remainder of Herpetology's holdings, and -

on Mon, 18 Sep 2006 21:19:34 André Martel wrote:

The fish people here at the NHB are getting rid of about 1000 plastic bags, well rolled up / in one cardboard box; these bags are similar (if not identical) to those I have seen you use in the field, for dry shell collecting; pop corn type plastic bag, about 20 cm wide and 85 cm long (flat measurements). Do you have such bags? Are you interested in getting that supply for free?

- so we also inherited Ichthyology's stock.

washing bags

One of the amazing features of the popcorn bags is their durability. Even when exposed to sunlight and weather, their plastic does not degrade, and when they're exposed to reducing conditions the colour changes towards brownish tones, but the plastic remains strong. We only discard a popcorn bag when it is seriously perforated: if it just has a hole in the bottom, we tie it off there, and reuse it as a shorter bag. The vast majority are okay for reuse and are set aside for washing.

I wash some individually and dry them on the handle of a mop or broom, and in each place we're living or working Fred finds a place to stuff the used bags before undertaking a washing.

In the washing our goal is to get the bags as clean as possible as quickly as possible. After the initial soaking, done in the warm water left after a bath with a trace of soap added so that it just barely bubbles, the first step is to scoop up a little water into bags with residual matter in them, and slosh this into a pail which can be thrown outside rather than going down to the septic tank. Then each bag is inverted and water scooped into the former outside, and it's laid in the tub for as many hours or days as it takes to get around to the next step, or for someone else to want to take a bath. 

Then the bags are gathered into a plastic bucket with clean hot water, and sloshed about, and the external and internal water squeezed out of the mass of bags.

They're then taken outside, where the bucket is set on a chair to minimize stooping-over back pain, the bags are inverted again and hung on the clothesline, ideally in the rain. 

When the outside is dry, they're turned inside out again and left to dry, or brought inside, either on the clothesline or indoors. When temperatures are below freezing, the drying is quicker, because ice can be shattered off the bags, and sometimes they're just put in the freezer to get rid of most of the water as ice, even when temperatures are warm.

largely written by Fred (Grenville County's leading popcorn bag washer)