Update on Water Quality

Update on Water Quality

Who can forget the explosion of interest in conservation in the late 1960s and early 70s?  The hot topics included the Cuyahoga River catching on fire in Ohio in 1969, a tetanus shot being needed if you fell into the Potomac River in the nation’s capital, smog in...
Enjoy Learning About and Helping Birds Through Birding!

Enjoy Learning About and Helping Birds Through Birding!

When I look out onto my backyard, I almost always see birds. We have a mid-sized city lot in a town of about 4,000 people, so I have modest expectations, but I’m never disappointed. Most of the time, just by taking a few minutes to observe, I can find over 10 species...
Volunteer to Support Nature – Become a Master Naturalist

Volunteer to Support Nature – Become a Master Naturalist

I should have known that I would grow up and end up working in the outdoors.  When we moved to the farm when I was 11 years old, I loved learning so many things just by going outside and running around in the fields, hills, quarries, rivers, and barnyards all around...
Meet the Crane Fly Larva

Meet the Crane Fly Larva

For me, my 2023 Nature Experience was the crane fly larva. I was entertaining a handful of children (5th – 6th grade), teaching the parameters (e.g., temperature, stream flow and depth, and turbidity) associated with water quality and monitoring (i.e., what we...
Prairie Strips in Fall

Prairie Strips in Fall

It’s a late fall afternoon, and I am walking along a four-year-old prairie strip that was planted by Valley Stewardship Network, where I work.  The ground is pretty sloped, but farmable – certainly in this part of the country – angling down through a corn...
Caring for Our Wisconsin Bats

Caring for Our Wisconsin Bats

My earliest memories of bats are from watching Bela Lugosi in the old Dracula movies and the time a bat got into our farmhouse when I was maybe 11 years old. I remember watching re-runs of Dracula movies on Saturday afternoons, wondering why a vampire and a bat were...