This semester, I helped to organize a Steelhead Trout release into Copeland Creek on campus, as part of a program where elementary school students release trout that they had raised in the classroom.
(more…)April 7 through May 2, 2023
My Vertebrate Biology students deployed a wildlife camera on April 7th, which I retrieved on May 20. Water was flowing in the creek throughout the entire deployment. The only unfortunate thing is that I must have set the photo resolution too high, as my 2GB memory card ran out of space on May 2. But even so, I was excited to see the variety of wildlife that we caught on the camera. This entry features just some of my favorite shots. All my wildlife camera photos (from 2016 to present) can be found on wildlifeinsights.org.
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Introducing my new favorite app: Padlet! I first encountered the app during an on-campus training – TIPS Toward Justice – and saw its potential for use in my own classes.
According to their website:
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May 20, 2022
09:00 to 11:30
Rather than giving my Vertebrate Biology students a conventional written final exam, I decided to do something more adventurous: have them participate in a BioBlitz on campus so I could assess their knowledge of local wildlife and identification techniques. For anyone not familiar with the term, a BioBlitz is an effort to document biodiversity in a given location during a certain period of time. While the structure of these events can vary, the idea is to identify as many species as possible in the time you are given.
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For the first time since COVID, I’m able to take my students on field trips again, and we had a fantastic one yesterday. I took my upper division Vertebrate Biology class to one of our university’s preserves: the Fairfield Osborn Preserve on Sonoma Mountain. One of the preserve’s researchers and naturalists – Julie Wittmann – was our host for the day, and our primary target was herpetofauna (reptilian vertebrates and amphibians). We started out by surveying some of the coverboards that were established in 2015, and then we headed down to the creek to look for salamanders. All along the way, we saw AMAZING wildlife, with a couple of absolute highlights for the day.
(more…)This article is from April, but it’s the first I’ve heard of this. The turtles we reintroduced to Mountain Lake in SF have HAD BABIES! This is amazingly good news! These turtles had been extirpated (driven locally extinct) from the lake at some point in the past, and the fact that the introduced turtles are able to reproduce means that this population might be able to sustain itself into the future. LOVE THIS SO MUCH!
Jessica Flores
April 29, 2021
I’ve been hearing great horned owls from my home for the past few weeks (as they move into their breeding season), and it inspired me to draw this:
Earlier this year, I completed an online certificate through the University of Newcastle, Australia: “NHI101x: Drawing Nature, Science, and Culture: Natural History Illustration 101.”
I thoroughly enjoyed this 6-week course, and it genuinely helped me improve my illustration skills. Partly due to the techniques we learned and practiced, but possibly more important, by boosting my confidence as I worked through the assignments successfully. I am wholly satisfied with my progress, and am already planning to take another course in illustration in January (this time, focusing specifically on digital artwork).
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Last month, I decided to do an Inktober challenge, combined with a set of “Drawlogies” prompts inspired by the science show “Ologies.” Here is the entire month’s worth of prompts. I’m re-rendering many of them in different styles, and I’ll be posting some of those as I go.
The Prompts:
(more…)This week, I’m using some Virtual Field materials in one of my classes (Ecosystem Exploration: https://thevirtualfield.org/virtual…/ecosystem-exploration).
In addition to the questions provided with the videos, I’m going to ask them to do some additional field journaling, including sketches. Here are the two I drew as examples (based on the Mojave Desert video), to give them some inspiration. (They aren’t expected to render things as completely as the tortoise, but the level of detail in the plant illustration should be doable by everyone).
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