Interesting Nature
- Extreme Insects by Richard Jones:: Featured on the Guardian website, this slideshow highlights a few images from a new book of extreme insects.
News
- School of the Year Awards:: From the Big Wildlife Garden in the U.K. is a list of regional winners of the first Big Wildlife Garden School of the Year competition.
- Gardens of Delight:: From the Deccan Herald is an article about corporate landscaping in Bangalore for wildlife habitat. Design theory is discussed and it is interesting to see that much of the principles of habitat design are the same in Bangalore as they are here in North America.
- Biophilia: “An Innate Emotional Affiliation with Nature”:: From The Dirt blog discusses how people experience biophilia and how to use that in landscape design.
- Creating wetlands in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor:: A video from the NBC Nightly News discusses a project that is trying to bring wetland habitat to Baltimore’s Inner Harbor in the form of floating islands that serve the purpose of cleaning the water as well as education and awareness.
- ScienceShot: Streetlights Make Male Birds Macho:: An article from Science that highlights a new study that looked into the affects of artificial list on male birds.
- L.A. County tests plan for bird-friendly plant maintenance at parks:: From the LA Times comes an article about a new program for parks maintenance to adopt strategies to disturb birds less. Part of the strategy involves changing the season pruning and trimming and to avoid an area if there’s a bird nest nearby.
- Curating the Urban Cemetery as Bird Habitat:: This is a very interesting article from the local ecologist blog that discusses the potential of cemeteries for urban wildlife habitat
Resources
- List of world bumblebees:: A database from the Natural History Museum that features a bumblebee ID, and a directory of bumblebees by region, group or color. Each family has information including habitat, food-plants, nesting and distribution
- Butterflies and Moths of North America:: This is a great resource to find out about specific species as well as find out what can be found in your county.
Events
- Pollinator Pathway in Seattle:: If you’re in the Seattle area, the Pollinator Pathway, which was featured on the blog (Pollinator Pathway: bringing pollinators to a Seattle neighborhood), is installing another batch of new gardens and will be holding a work party October 16th – 17th from 11am-4pm both days.
Video
- Here is an excellent video produced by SW Neighborhoods, Inc. and the SW Watershed Resource Center in Portland Oregon about backyard wildlife habitat.
