Ontario Nature Blog

When fellow Ontario Nature Youth Council member Yiming and I created Project 275 to fight species extinction with art, there were 275 species and subspecies at risk in Ontario (see the full list here). We had always known that the “275” would eventually become symbolic when the actual number changed, although we had hoped any change would be driven by species recovery, not politics and declines. Alas! At the ...

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Following the successful ten-year run of the Ontario Reptile and Amphibian Atlas, Ontario Nature developed a Long-Term Monitoring Protocol (LTMP) to fill important knowledge gaps about Ontario’s common and at-risk snakes. Since 2019, we’ve expanded the LTMP from nine monitoring locations to over 60 sites across the province! We recently published a Story Map where ...

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In 2022, Carleton University biologist, Grégory Bulté arrived at Opinicon Lake for his first day of field work for the season. Bulté has been studying and tracking northern map turtles since 2003, returning every spring to the lake. As he went to retrieve his camera from the hibernation site, he spotted a dead turtle. He ...

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At a friend’s cottage I recently uncovered a copy of The Reptiles of Ontario published in 1939 by the Royal Ontario Museum of Zoology. It’s an artifact that thrills with the mention of the extraordinary nature once found near human settlement. It says that, in 1877, a timber rattlesnake, a species now extirpated from Ontario, ...

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When I told my parents that my brother and I would be out on a weekend to go to a snake event, they were more than skeptical. Like more than half the world’s population, they’re not particularly comfortable at the thought of being in snake habitat. Snakes are one of the most misunderstood and feared ...

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