Read Urban Species Profile:: Swifts for detailed information about the Vaux’s Swifts. Twice a year Vaux’s Swifts roost in the chimney at Frank Wagner Elementary School in Monroe, Washington. Once a year the school hosts ‘Swift Night Out’ where people come visit from all over the state, and even country to watch the swifts descend at dusk [...]
Running now through May 15th of 2011 is Presidio Habitats in San Francisco. It is a joint venture between FOR-SITE Foundation and Presidio Trust and started running May 16th of this year. The Presidio has a long and interesting military history starting in 1776 with occupation under Spain followed by Mexico and finally the United States [...]
This was mentioned in a recent Foragings post, but it has such great design implications that I wanted to feature it in more detail. Over several years a landowner has turned previous agriculture land into a wetland habitat. Natural England helped with this transformation through their Higher Level Stewardship program which “aims to deliver significant [...]
This is my comprehensive project that I completed in my final year of the Landscape Architecture program at the University of Oregon. The two-term project was the culmination of my educational career and I wanted to choose something meaningful that would relate to my main interest of creating and designing urban wildlife habitat. I started to [...]
Retaining walls are a fact of life for many landscapes, even those with only a slight slope. The majority of walls however, are constructed as a flat surface, stones bound together with mortar which don’t serve any benefit to wildlife. Stone walls however, can be quite beneficial for wildlife if designed and constructed correctly. Even [...]
Swifts are one of the few birds that can draw crowds like rock stars. Their roosting is one of the greatest migration wonders of the natural world and they often choose to share it with us in the urban world. Several species of swifts are well known to roost in chimneys, often where many people [...]
What started as an artists sketch four decades ago has now become a working product. In 1970 artist Robert Smithson, perhaps best known for his ‘Spiral Jetty’ earthwork, created a sketch showing a tugboat towing a vegetated island on a river and called it “Floating Island“. During his lifetime he was never able to see [...]
When we talk about a nest box we usually envision a wooden structure, often in the shape of a human house, hanging from a tree in the backyard. However, if you talked about a nest box in the UK, they may have a different idea. The RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) has [...]
Nestworks 1 2 3 via:: 51% Studios 51% Studios, an architecture firm from London, has created Nestworks 1 2 3 as part of the London Festival of Architecture, running through this weekend. Their design is three, ready-made nesting structures, blocks, boughs and bushes, that are placed throughout London for people to find, or not find. [...]
The Nighthawk is a bird that used to be abundant throughout the US but has been in decline in recent years. There are many potential reasons for this, among them is a change in the construction of roof tops. Nighthawks have been known to nest on roofs with gravel tops, but since most roof construction [...]
In Cardiff Bay, Wales there is a new housing installation aimed at birds and bats. Gitta Gschwendtner, a German-born, London-based artist worked with ecologists to create the new housing in Century Warf containing 1,000 different boxes. The wall sits along a public river pathway, backed by a residential development. There are some good articles about [...]