Ontario Nature Blog

With National Volunteer Week now underway, it’s an ideal time to reflect on the role people play in protecting Ontario’s biodiversity. Community science is one meaningful way to get involved. And as spring returns to Ontario, pollinators begin to reappear in fields, forests, wetlands, and gardens making them a natural group of species to observe ...

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“How about doing a moth survey at Sydenham?” “A moss survey?” Asked Roberta Buchanan, local property steward for Sydenham River Nature Reserve, who didn’t quite hear me while we were walking outside. “No, moths. Like a nocturnal equivalent to the butterfly survey. Who knows what we’ll find?” It was 2023. I knew how unique the ...

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“I’m in a bit of a moth phase,” a park ranger friend of mine mentioned as I scrolled through his latest iNaturalist observations. I tried to cloak my inner voices that were equally impressed by his depth of knowledge and perplexed as to why one would ever be in a moth phase. Little did I ...

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After retiring from teaching, Jeanne McRight found herself back in the classroom to earn a horticulture diploma from the University of Guelph. Among her assignments? Create an urban sustainability project connected to her own garden. But what started as a school project would soon grow far beyond the classroom. McRight was already an avid gardener. ...

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Imagine the roadsides of expressways being a meadow of native flowering plants instead of mown turf grass. Imagine the beauty and habitat for pollinators that this would create. The dream of the Pollinator Roadsides, a project of Waterloo Region Nature, is that this will become the normal practice. These roadside areas constitute potential important pollinator ...

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