Notice Board

Nature Conservancy Canada is inviting everyone to take pictures of living things (all plants and animals) in their backyards over the long weekend of August 1 to 5, and to submit them to their BioBlitz web page. We encourage you to take part!

Our campus is rich with all sorts of plants and animals and it is our backyard. Now that we have a Campus Sustainability Plan, we need to find out what plants and animals live here so that we can figure out how to keep them healthy. If you sign up with the NCC and send pictures, you will be helping get this started. In addition, if you send your pictures to Dr. Jennifer Mather (mather@uleth.ca) or Dr. Dan Johnson (dan.johnson@uleth.ca), we can begin our collection here too. 

See the attachment with a quick guide to the campus and its inhabitants. Remember, what lives here isn’t just the really obvious animals like the magpies and deer. It also includes the dandelions in the lawn, the dragonflies over the pond, the milkweed that helps monarch butterflies, the ladybug beetles in the gardens and so much more. We have several species that are currently at risk and of concern on campus, and we need to take care of them — so help us out and let's find what we have so we can all take care of our backyard going forward.

Below you will see a list of the groups to look for and the places that you might look that contain different habitats.

 Groups                                                    Location                                                   Special Considerations             

 Mammals                                                All campus                                              Easy---big

 Birds                                                        All campus                                              Krause guide, do morning

 Insects                                                     All campus                                              Small, look carefully

 Soil animals                                             Community Garden?                            Under rocks and wood

 Water animals                                         Pond                                                       Special equipment for viewing

 Fungi                                                        On vegetation                                         Tree trunks, dead wood, compost

 Trees, shrubs                                          All campus                                              Bark, leaf group, seeds or fruit

 Herbaceous plants                                 All campus                                              Leaf array, seeds or flowers