Today’s Friday Film is ‘What Plants Talk About’, an episode of Nature from PBS. When we think about plants, we don’t often associate a term like “behavior” with them, but experimental plant ecologist JC Cahill wants to change that. The University of Alberta professor maintains that plants do behave and lead anything but solitary and [...]
Today’s Friday Film is a lecture by Dr. Kristina Hill, Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia presented by the Harvard Museum of Natural History. I was familiar with her name as a co-editor of Ecology and Design with Bart Johnson, one of my professors at the University of Oregon so [...]
Today’s Friday Film features a panel discussion in two parts titled Biodiversity in Our Cities: The Case for Urban Nature. This panel coordinated and moderated by Marielle Anzelone, Conservation Biologist & Executive Director of NYC Wildflower Week, features four different panelists of very diverse backgrounds and professions. The panel presents a comprehensive view of urban biodiversity from not only [...]
The Friday Film this week looks at the topic of pollination with a TED talk from cinematographer Louie Schwartzberg. In this brief talk he presents footage from his film, Wings of Life which features incredible imagery of hummingbirds, bats, bees and other pollinators. From the TED website: Pollination: it’s vital to life on Earth, but largely unseen by [...]
This Friday Film is a fascinating episode of Nature from PBS titled, A Murder of Crows. The episode explores the intelligence of crows around the world and focuses on a new study by John Marzluff, author of In the Company of Crows and Ravens, which shows that crows can even recognize human faces. This urban bird continues to [...]
In the latest installment of Friday Film we look at a short film titled Life Nature You by Myles Thompson. This film reminds us that wildlife is everywhere, even in a small patch of lawn in a suburban yard. The filmmakers daughter discovered the tiny wildlife in her lawn and created a small nature reserve to [...]
A new feature on The Metropolitan Field Guide will be a video post every other week. There are a lot of great videos out there about urban wildlife, urban biodiversity and many other topics related to the design of urban wildlife habitat. Some are art films while others are documentaries, lectures and discussions. To kick [...]
Here is a wonderful short film featuring urban wildlife in Jersey City. The footage features osprey, kingfishers, egrets and more. It’s always great to see people feature urban nature because there’s not nearly enough focus and exploration of the urban environment. Thanks to John Dunstan for sending me a link to his wonderful film to [...]