Bicycling with Butterflies
April 11, 2022[caption id="attachment_274978" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Author, educator, and "butterbiker" Sara Dykman observes a monarch sipping nectar on goldenrod during her epic 10,201-mile bike trip as she followed the butterfly's migration.[/caption]
Sara Dykman did something that no other human on this planet has ever done, or even thought to do. In 2017, she followed the entire migration route of monarch butterflies from their overwintering spot in Mexican mountains, north to Canada as far as monarchs go, and back to Mexico. Over a full year, she followed the butterflies.
On a bicycle. By herself. Logging 10,201 miles, to be exact. (That’s only like…
Snakes, Turtles, and Toads, Oh My!
April 4, 2022[caption id="attachment_274929" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Why did the box turtle cross the road? Likely to lay her eggs, Bernard "Billy" Brown says.[/caption]
While Philadelphia is a big, old, well-developed urban area, one of its many surprises is the abundant wildlife found not just in natural places like the Wissahickon, the Schuylkill Center, the John Heinz refuge, and more, but tucked into the many nooks and crannies across the city. Especially surprising might be the large number of reptiles and amphibians living alongside us as our natural neighbors.
One of our city’s most engaging naturalists, Bernard “Billy” Brown, will introduce you to…
The Unraveling of the Red Knot
March 28, 2022
The red knot is one of the region’s most extraordinary birds, facing one of conservation's biggest threats, but sadly flies under the radar of too many people. Too few of us have heard of the knot and fewer still know its story. But on Thursday, March 31 at 7:00 p.m, we'll offer you a unique opportunity to dive into this incredible story.
A nine-inch-long sandpiper with a terra cotta belly, the red knot makes one of migration’s longest runs, flying 9,300 miles each spring from Tierra del Fuego at the bottom tip of South America to nest above the…
The Real March Madness: Outside in Nature
March 21, 2022[caption id="attachment_274808" align="aligncenter" width="480"] Toadshade trillium in bud, one of the many spring wildflowers soon to bloom on our trails.[/caption]
It’s hugely exciting times for college hoops fans, awash in basketball games where they breathlessly wait to see if, oh, the Providence Friars can hold off the South Dakota State Jackrabbits. (OK, Villanova vs. Delaware is pretty cool.) Some $3.1 billion will be bet-- DOUBLE what was spent only last year-- and almost 40 million Americans will fill out those brackets.
Over 19-year-old kids playing hoops. Welcome to March Madness.
Meanwhile, receiving no fanfare at all, nature in March is…
Ukraine: “This is a Fossil Fuel War”
March 14, 2022[caption id="attachment_274792" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A gas-powered power plant and thermal power plant in snow-covered Anadyr, Siberia, Russia.[/caption]
We’ve all been watching the increasingly grim war in Ukraine with a mixture of horror, outrage, and sadness at the needless loss of life and the tragic outpouring of refugees. Given Vladimir Putin’s relentless resolve in pushing forward at all costs, I’m guessing the situation only worsens between my writing this on Friday and your reading it next week.
Svitlana Krakovska has a unique lens to view the war. A Kyiv resident, she’s Ukraine’s leading climate scientist and the head of the country’s…
The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Great American Tree
March 7, 2022[caption id="attachment_274766" align="aligncenter" width="600"] A chestnut tree showing its open bur and those famously alluring fruits, craved by both people and a diverse assemblage of animals, from deer to passenger pigeons. Photo courtesy of the American Chestnut Foundation.[/caption]
Walk through a local forest, and you’ll see a diverse assemblage of trees-- tuliptrees reaching straight up into the sky, sassafras wiggling their trunks through the canopy, black cherries sporting their chipped bark, beeches seemingly standing like huge immovable elephants, massive smooth gray trunks imitating pachyderms.
But you won’t see any American chestnut trees, once one of the most common trees in…
LESS IS MORE
February 28, 2022[caption id="attachment_274729" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Guests explore the gallery during December's opening reception of LESS IS MORE.[/caption]
If you visit our art gallery, you won’t find any real or crafted plants, any carved or photographed trees, any mapped or painted landscapes. Instead, in Makeba Rainey’s show LESS IS MORE: The Nature of Letting Go, you’ll see large fabric portraits overlaid with patterns of African wax cloth, a Kwanzaa altar, a wall of church fans, and a cozy corner stocked with books. And you may wonder: how is this environmental art?
The answer is both clear and complex—namely, we humans are also…
The First Wildflower of Spring is Here!
February 16, 2022[caption id="attachment_274103" align="aligncenter" width="400"] Skunk cabbage, one of the first wildflowers to bloom during spring, sprouting on our Ravine Loop.[/caption]
In this weird winter of seesaw weather-- 60 degrees one day, 20 the next with an inch of snow to boot-- last week I walked the Ravine Loop in search of one of my Holy Grails, one of my key markers in the natural year's calendar. I was searching for the very first flower of spring, one that appears as early as mid-February, the first flower in a long march that concludes in the late summer with goldenrod and aster,…
North Light Weathers the Viral Storm
February 7, 2022[caption id="attachment_273862" align="aligncenter" width="600"] North Light's Jared Poindexter helps one of his students in the community center's after-school program, one of the many services the center provides.[/caption]
Remember when the pandemic hit back in March 2020, and non-profits like the Schuylkill Center and North Light Community Center shuttered our doors, assuming we’d close for a few weeks, “flatten the curve,” and reopen in April? Well, that didn't happen.
Instead, non-profits have been battered financially and programmatically by choppy waves in the viral ocean. Some of us have swum these pandemic seas-- not always gracefully-- but many non-profits have sunk, disappearing…
The Hidden History of Groundhog Day
January 31, 2022[caption id="attachment_273823" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Punxsutawney Phil meets his adoring masses in 2020, when he called an early spring. What will he say this year?[/caption]
Early Wednesday morning, way out there in the small town of Punxsutawney, a portly aging man in top hat and tails will unceremoniously yank a grumpy groundhog from his winter den and present it to a roaring crowd numbering in the tens of thousands. The man then will whisper to the groundhog in a secret, shared language, what he calls “Groundhogese”…
And, for the 136th year since 1886, Punxsutawney Phil, the most famous rodent besides a…
