Person

Nelson, Colleen Helgason

• Helgason, Colleen

1932-

Colleen Helgason Nelson was born on September 30, 1932 in Bismarck, North Dakota. She entered the University of Minnesota in 1950, graduating summa with a B.A. in Music (piano) in 1955. The previous year she married Carl Robert Nelson, an architect. The couple had seven children together. After spending a year in Rome, where her husband studied as a Fulbright Scholar, Nelson entered graduate school at the University of Illinois in 1957. She graduated in 1961 with an M.Sc. Her thesis was titled Six Sparrows of the Northern Great Plains: Descriptive Ecology. While a graduate student, she produced an exhibit for the James Ford Bell Museum of Natural History in Minneapolis. In 1962, she began research on downy waterfowl at the Delta Waterfowl Research Station at Delta, Manitoba. The following year, she continued her research at the Round Lake Waterfowl Station in Minnesota. The following year, she immigrated to Canada, where her husband took a position with the University of Manitoba. In 1967, she started doing museum and library exhibitions on downy waterfowl at the Museum of Man and Nature and at a studio-laboratory at home. In the next twenty years, she mounted over a dozen exhibitions and wrote several articles on waterfowl. In 1977, she was named a research associate at the Manitoba Museum of Man and Nature. In 1981, she was named a research associate of National Museum of National Sciences in Ottawa. In 1993, the results of her thirty years of research were published in Downy Waterfowl of North America (Delta Station Press).

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Created by Lewis St. George Stubbs (2002). Revised by N. Courrier (March 2019).