Share your love of nature with your love, in nature
A pair of cedar waxwings (Photo by Brendan Toews)
Behold! The year’s (supposedly) most romantic day is coming up! Whether you see it as a cash grab for makers of V-Day buys or a necessary observance, it’s easy to get swept up in the fuss. But of all the roses, chocolates and candle...
Doing Science that Matters: Engaging with Communities in Collaborative Scientific Research
University of Victoria student Megan Adams monitoring hair snags near Wuikinuxv Village, BC (Photo by ACS lab)
I should have known I would become an ecologist. As a child, I always seemed to catch a salamander while waiting for the school bus, or bring home precious flowers to press through the seasons. I could stare from the bus window out into the...
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...
Where the bears are: An update on the Wuikinuxv grizzly bear project
Grizzly bear (Photo by Vince Heney)
In the spring of 2013, I approached the Nature Conservancy of Canada (NCC) about a project in Wuikinuxv Territory, in the heart of the Great Bear Rainforest, where grizzly bears and humans have shared the same riverbanks for thousands of years,...
My 2013 Christmas Bird Count story: Why I've become a regular CBC participant
Snowy owl (Photo by Chris Moncrieff)
There is a very cohesive feeling that comes with participating in a Christmas Bird Count. For more than 100 years, citizens across the Americas have been coming together between December 14 and January 5 to spy, spot, listen for, photograph and...
Of bugs and slugs: Pint-sized citizen scientist discovers a strange blue slug, far from home
Blue-grey taildropper (Photo courtesy of Habitat Acquisition Trust)
My seven-year-old son Malcolm was excited about going on the Slug & Snail Walk at Chase Woods. He loves hiking, and I hadn’t the heart to tell him that there likely wouldn’t be a lot of actual hiking on this field trip. Slugs and...
