The swift fox: A conservation success story
Swift fox (Photo by Karol Dabbs)
Although I work as the Nature Conservancy of Canada's (NCC's) conservation coordinator responsible for the area in Alberta where swift foxes now live, I have never seen a wild one myself. These are elusive creatures. I did see several being...
It's the great pumpkin pollinator! Meet the squash bee
Female squash bee on a male pumpkin flower (Photo by Margaret Chan)
At my house, Halloween is a frenzy of pumpkins — those lovely globes that throb with the vitality of summer. We carve them into frightening orange-skinned, ghoulish-grinned beasts set aglow by the light of beeswax candles. I fell in love...
The search for an elusive species
Black purse-web spider (Photo by Rob Craig, Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry)
The black purse-web spider is not well known in Ontario. The species has been found occasionally across Southern Ontario, from Windsor to Belleville, including a recent find in Rouge Park in 2012. Interestingly, it belongs to the group of...
Bring bees back to your garden
Bee pollinating a cherry tree (Photo by Jaimee Morozoff, NCC staff)
A few weeks ago, my mother texted me a photo of a shallow bowl with some rocks that she had set up beside her flowerbed. I didn’t have a clue what it was, and I told her as much. “It’s for my bumblebee,” she replied....
The Ontario BioBlitz Program
Dave Ireland (Photo by Tallie Garey)
A bioblitz is a biodiversity snapshot: an intensive survey of all living things in a given area within a set time, usually within the span of 24 hours. Biologist E.O. Wilson helped make the concept mainstream in 1999 when he suggested that citizen...
Getting rid of invasive species has never been more…delicious.
Maria Olkinitskaya picking dandelions at Baie Verte CV event, NB (Photo by NCC)
If you can’t beat them, eat them! Getting rid of invasive species has never been more…delicious. Invasive species management as a whole is extremely complex. However, cooking with certain edible invasives is a creative, fun and...
The Jenga theory of biodiversity: The tipping point of ecosystems and the diversity of species
Jenga tower (Photo by Wikimedia Commons, Derek Mawhinney and Cafe Nervosa)
A while back I was a guest on the CBC Radio program, Shift New Brunswick to speak about the discovery of a little flowering plant— one of the rarest in my home province and a federally listed species at risk. You most likely may not have...
