Tag: nature
Valentine’s Day Nature Kit: At-Home Version
February 13, 2021Happy Valentine’s Day weekend! This week’s nature kits focus on the unique ways that animals find mates. Whether it’s by impressing their partner with elaborate courtship dances, showing off their brightly colored feathers, or by serenading them with beautiful calls, “love” in the animal kingdom stretches the gamut from cute to quirky to downright bizarre.
Every Saturday, nature kits have been given out on a first-come, first-served basis from 10:00 am-12:00 pm. Nature kits focus on a different theme each week and are meant to be done along our trails. If you can’t make it out to the Center to…
Naughty by Nature: A Valentine’s Day Special Event
February 8, 2021Birds do it, bees do it, and sentimental fleas? Don’t even ask.
In celebration of the coming Valentine’s Day holiday, the Schuylkill Center cordially invites you to a special edition of our new Thursday Night Live series. “Naughty by Nature” features the amazing stories of sex and courtship in the animal kingdom, as these stories are extraordinary and just not shared often enough. I’ll be offering this PG-13 lecture on Thursday, February 11 at 7:00 p.m. The event is free, but you’ll need to register and get the Zoom link.
Animals possess a wide range of adaptations to court their mates.…
At-Home Nature Exploration: Animals in Winter
February 6, 2021COVID-19 has forced the Schuylkill Center to pivot and reimagine many of our programs. At the beginning of September, we began to reinvent our popular Schuylkill Saturday program so that families could explore our trails through self-guided activities available in Nature Kits. Every Saturday, Nature Kits have been given out on a first-come, first-served basis from 10:00 am–12:00 pm. Nature kits focus on a different theme each week and are meant to be done along our trails. Since the start of our nature kit program, we have seen more than 800 people come out and have handed out over 450…
Biden: A Breath of Fresh Air on the Climate Front
January 26, 2021
Last Wednesday, after months of drama culminating in an insurrection, Joe Biden was peacefully inaugurated as our 46th president. For the environment, this was both a literal and figurative breath of fresh air, as on that same day he signed executive orders reversing key Trump administration actions on climate, including having the US rejoin the Paris climate accord.
And not a moment too soon.
[caption id="attachment_272215" align="alignleft" width="1024"] The hottest years on record, with 2020 coming in second only to 2016. Graph courtesy of Climate Central.[/caption]
As the above graph shows, 2020, now in the history books, was the second…
A New Lens on Nature: Community photos in “Citizen’s Eye”
January 16, 2021It almost could be another tree, except for the ears. Look a little closer and you realize it’s a deer, stock-still and staring at you through the morning mist. As autumn leaves rustle, its silent appraisal reminds you: you are not alone. These woods are a shared space.
This encounter is captured in a photo by Peter DeStefano, one he submitted to the upcoming community show, “Citizen’s Eye — A Kaleidoscope of Nature.” More than 400 photos taken by over 200 people—Schuylkill Center staff, members, volunteers, neighbors, friends—document surprising encounters with nature from the past 10 months. Every photo is…
News Flash: Beavers in Roxborough!
January 12, 2021One of the feel-good stories on the environmental scene is the rewilding of large cities like Philadelphia, where suddenly peregrine falcons nest in church steeples and on Delaware River bridges, bald eagles pull large fish out of the Schuylkill River, and coyotes amble down Domino Lane.
In that vein, members of the Roxborough-Manayunk Conservancy were somewhat startled to discover that the restoration plantings they’ve doggedly placed along the Schuylkill River have been devoured by…beavers! Wait, beavers in Roxborough?
Once extirpated—a fancy word meaning locally extinct—across Pennsylvania, hunted because their fur was remarkably valuable and because we did not appreciate their ability…
TreeVitalizing Our Forests
October 10, 2020By Drew Rinaldi Subits, Land Stewardship Coordinator
You may have recently noticed a large clearing across the trail from Pine Grove, which has been steadily cleared and then mowed and maintained throughout the Spring and Summer months. If you have been there more recently, you may have noticed fencing and a young grove of trees and shrubs.
This newest planting effort was possible through the collaboration of our Land and Facilities team, a state-funded tree planting grant initiative from TreeVitalize, and a RJ Carbone, a local young man looking to complete his Eagle Scout project.
For the past five years,…
Fall Bird Migration
October 4, 2020By Jasmine Lee, Communications Intern
Fall migration, the large-scale movement of birds from their summer breeding homes to their winter grounds is part of an annual cycle that is undertaken by more than half of all the birds in North America. Unfortunately, it is estimated that in the U.S. alone, one billion birds die each year as a result of collisions with glass windows, walls, and other structures, with numbers typically spiking during migration months. At the Schuylkill Center and the Wildlife Clinic, warblers of all kinds, flycatchers, woodcocks, and even hummingbirds are passing through as they make their way…
Kindergarteners reboot their relationship with nature
August 6, 2020
“To Cattail Pond! To Cattail Pond!” several of the kindergarteners shout as they skip towards the Schuylkill Center’s serene, sunlit woodland opening at the edge of our forest, just a few quick steps outside our back door. This is one of our most active sites on the property in the late winter and early spring when water is abundant and vegetation is emerging.
For our 5- and 6-year-old kindergarteners, it’s an ideal place to set the outdoor classroom scene. Given the overwhelming evidence of the many health benefits of learning outdoors, especially in the context of the current health crisis,…
Year of Action: Join us in Taking Action
January 31, 2020By Mike Weilbacher
The New Year 2020 promises to be pivotal on a number of fronts, but especially the environment. The increasing urgency of the climate crisis has sparked higher levels of activism by new, youth-led groups like the Sunrise Movement. Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s lonely 2018 climates strike in front of the Swedish parliament have blossomed into climate strikes of millions of kids skipping school across the world.
The presidential election near the year's end promises to be not only loud, but will have an out sized impact on environmental policy, with major implications for how America, and thus…
