LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

(IN OUR OWN NEIGHBORHOODS)

this project is called LOCAL BIOLOGY (until we think of something better)

  • more work
  • longer committment
  • requires effort, time and collaboration with other people

Essential human skills: Make fire sticky icon

This is a level 2 activity because
* making fire without matches, lighters, flint, bow drills is really hard work, and you have to know your plants and use strength and patience in order to make fire.
* there should be supervision and guidance for youngsters who want to learn this skill

Get started

This activity is simple: learn how to make fire in the very very old way - before the match. Involve lots of people, and tell us all the stories of what you experienced.

Hang in there

Help preserve one of the main trees of the East, Black Ash (and also Anishinaabe Basket-Weaving Tradition while you're at it)

At the Indigenous Earth Summit, I heard Kelly Church explain about what the Emerald Ash Borer is...and why it is horrible.

links

The Amazing Part - making baskets from trees!

Kelly Church showed us some of her tools for basket making.

Coffee Shop Seasonal Calendars

This Spring, we will be bringing Local Biology to our local and beloved Coffee Shops (just a handful of coffee shops, just the ones that we, personally, attend regularly.)

We will be providing both you, and ourselves, with the materials necessary to get more observations & understanding about wild things in our own neighborhoods.

It's pretty simple -- and if you want to do it to, let us know. We hope to have this project go in 5-10 coffee shops next year.

Tiny Field Guides

Our plans for the summer

There are a few of us who decided that we really will make some tiny field guides for our own neighborhoods. Subjects so far include: birds, ants, trees, bees, bike sound mapping.

We are going to try sharing these with the people in our neighborhood. We will let you know how it goes.

If you want to get involved, it's easy. Pick something you want to learn about, and make a little guide. Share it with us and we will be happy to give you some feedback.

What is a Tiny Field Guide?

Tiny Field Guides are little books made from 1 piece of printer paper. The paper is folded & cut to make 8 little pages — a front, back, and 6 pages for descriptions and observations.

Through this website, we can upload our guides, and digitize the content in the guides. This will make the content of the guides searchable through the internet. This means people in our neighborhoods might find our little guides!

(we will make a picture of this for you!)

Identify twigs in winter

A great activity for winter biology, in places with leaves that fall off trees: identifying twigs. The twigs shouldn't change much for the long winter, so you have lots of time. You can do this indoors, and what you learn makes a landscape of barren trees and shrubs a little more welcoming and approachable.

Background

Scarred twigs

Make super-accessible observations

Everytime you record an observation about something in the natural world, there's a chance that someone else would like to know. Local Biology supports formatting observations for world-wide sharing of eco-data. If you would like to format your observations of the natural world, here is some guidance.

Coming soon Use Local Biology observations

We will provide you with the tools you need to create observations in a format that is meaningful for exchange with a broader community of scientists, ecologists and others.

Super-tag your nature photography collection

For those of you who like to organize your nature photography collections, and especially to those of you who want to offer your photo collections of various species and nature preserves to a larger database of biological information - you can add tags to your photos to help make them more accessible to computers.

Well, good news. We're working to make this a little easier to do.

Geo and taxa-tagging your nature photos

Help Bring Back the Bison!

In October 2006, there was a meeting about bison restoration. This was a meeting of parks, bison conservationists, the Intertribal Bison Coop and others. All these different people working together towards restoring bison to the great American plains.

Grow plants in abandoned lots

Some folks like to grow vegetables and other plants in abandoned chunks of soil amid urban concrete. There are lots of online resources.

A Facebook group
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=4605708492

which led me here

Based in London, these folks
http://www.guerrillagardening.org/

Which links me here:
Los Angeles!!!
http://www.laguerrillagardening.org/

Edmonton
http://edmontongg.blogspot.com/

Toronto
http://www.publicspace.ca/gardeners.htm

Brussels
http://brussels-farmer.blogspot.com/

Somewhere German?!
http://www.gruenewelle.org/forum.html

Record a mushroom (draft)

Level 2 means:
* this activity requires you to do some research
* this activity has a number of steps
* the activity uses another online tool, which is also undergoing lots of growth
* this activity needs some mushroom experts to give us some advice about what to do

I was pointed to this great website - www.mushroomobserver.org

Here's how you can get involved with locating mushrooms

Part One: Find Mushroom

  1. Step 1: Find a mushroom