Using GPS tags attached to the birds, associate professor Chris Tonra and graduate student Aaron Skinner, both of CFAES’ School of Environment and Natural Resources, helped discover some surprising facts about the long migrations that eastern whip-poor-wills make from their Midwestern (including Ohio) breeding grounds.
(Photo: Eastern whip-poor-will, Getty Images.)
The prothonotary warbler, which in summer breeds in eastern and central North America, including Ohio, spends winter in just one country in South America. So says a new study led by Christopher Tonra, assistant professor in CFAES’ School of Environment and Natural Resources. The finding, Tonra said, “speaks to how important habitat protection in this one country is to the (birds’) overall population.” Read the story. (Photo: Male prothonotary warbler, Getty Images.)
Pollinators — butterflies, bees and others — are key to farming, gardening and healthy diets. But globally, unfortunately, their populations are declining. Learn and see ways to help them, especially by growing the plants they need, in an expert talk called “Pollinator Habitat” in the Gwynne Conservation Area at Farm Science Review. It’s set for noon to 12:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20.
See the full Gwynne schedule. The Review overall runs from Sept. 18-20. (Photo: Monarch butterfly, Getty Images.)
http://vimeo.com/182386219
Follow Skeate, Arwen, Hermione and Mr. Darcy, among others — radiotagged timber rattlesnakes living in southeast Ohio woods — on the @TimberTweets Twitter feed by CFAES’s Peterman Lab. Lab staff are tracking the secretive snakes, an Ohio endangered species, to see how forest management affects them. Venomous but shy, with a taste for eating small rodents (including ones spreading Lyme disease), timber rattlers help ecosystems and, quietly, people.
Lab head Bill Peterman, assistant professor in CFAES’s School of Environment and Natural Resources, says, “I’ve had a passion for amphibians and reptiles since I was a kid catching frogs and snakes.” He’s in the video above.
CFAES’s Bee Lab hosts a workshop on Creating Pollinator Habitat from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18, in the Shisler Conference Center, OARDC, 1680 Madison Ave., Wooster. The event features about a dozen experts from CFAES and elsewhere speaking on creating pollinator habitat in diverse ecosystems, including vacant urban land, roadsides, field edges, utility rights-of-way, pastures and gardens. Registration is $50 and includes handouts, morning refreshments and lunch. Learn more and register.
Ohio’s Division of Wildlife recently honored Medina County Career Center graduates Dan Phillips and Emma Trapp for their work developing a WILD School-designated wildlife garden at the center. Both are now students at CFAES’s Agricultural Technical Institute in Wooster. Ann Norman of northeast Ohio’s Sun News has the story.
Fire plays a role in the ecology of most forests. But what does it do to the wildlife that lives there? National Geographic’s Daily News recently talked to CFAES scientist Mazeika Sullivan. (Photo: Terry Tompkins, USDA Forest Service.)
You can manage a woods for both trees and turkeys — and for timber, titmice and timberdoodles, too. Learn how Feb. 11 in Bucyrus. (Photo: Wild turkey by Dimus via Wikimedia Commons.)
Biodiversity is a key part of sustainability. Although in this case, the biodiversity is of certain mammals, including predators, that are living in growing numbers in our cities. CFAES’s Stan Gehrt is quoted in recent issues of Science and Scientific American on the boom in coyotes and other urban wildlife. (Photo by JoernHauke via Wikimedia Commons.)
A new book based on CFAES and Ohio Division of Wildlife research details how to improve habitat for forest birds in southeast Ohio (pdf). More about it here.