Nature
-
Wild About Conservation Action
What is that? I’m barely five meters down the path when a small yellow flower catches my eye. The prairie landscape in southern Alberta is dotted with different species of little yellow daisies,…
-
6 Essential Nature Reads
Like so many people, I have a bookshelf that is overflowing with familiar reads and yet-to-be-discovered favourites. Among the shelves, there are always those books that stay with me and that I return…
-
Wild About Herbariums
When I was a kid, one of my hobbies was collecting specimens of local wildflowers. Any time I went out exploring I’d tuck an old grocery bag into my pocket so that I…
-
Wild About Citizen Science
The herbarium label on my screen is dated 1932. The hand-writing is faded, but if I zoom in, I can make out the necessary information. Carefully, I type the requested data into the…
-
Wild About Noticing Nature
One of the things I’ve been doing over the past few months is spending more time outside exploring the local parks. I’m very lucky that my city is bisected by a river and…
-
Wild About Bird Migration
One of the interesting things about spending the summer going back to the same walking trails to listen for birds (I use the Merlin app), is noticing when different birds disappear from the…
-
Wild About Webcomics
Those of us who care about nature and the environment are often viewed as a humourless bunch who are more likely to wag a finger about plastic straws than laugh at the absurdity…
-
Wild About Ecological Anachronism
Mammoths and other Pleistocene megafauna went extinct thousands of years ago, but if you look closely, you can see their ghosts. Within an ecosystem, many plant and animal species form symbiotic relationships where…
-
Wild About Wilderness
In my early 20s, I hiked into the backcountry of the southern Canadian Rockies. With horses carrying the tents and other gear, we climbed to the Continental Divide. Seeing mountains stretch in all…
-
Wild About Animal Culture
Our knowledge of animal behaviour has grown significantly over the past few decades and one of the places our understanding has shifted is around social learning and animal culture. For a long time…
