“A club at The Ohio State University is working to tackle the problem of birds colliding head-on with building windows.” So begins our latest CFAES Story, which features CFAES’ Ornithology Club and was written by Yianni Sarris. Sarris is an Ohio State political science major and a student writer with CFAES’ Marketing and Communications unit.
Continue reading Student club watching, protecting campus birds
If you’ve been to the Lake Erie islands lately, you’ve probably seen Lake Erie watersnakes, which were brought back from the brink of extinction—to the benefit of the islands’ natural systems—by scientists and volunteers with CFAES’ Stone Laboratory.
Learn more in the video above and in our latest CFAES Story.
The 2019 Ohio River Valley Woodland and Wildlife Workshop is later this week: it’s Saturday, March 30, at Clifty Falls State Park in Madison, Indiana. It’s especially for woodland owners in Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky; features natural resource experts from those three states, including from CFAES (CFAES is one of the event’s organizers); and offers 13 sessions on interesting aspects of the trees and wildlife that live on your land.
Continue reading It’s spring, peeps! Check out this workshop
The annual Ohio Woodland, Water, and Wildlife Conference is for you if you work in natural resources, manage land, or both. The agenda features 15 expert-led sessions grouped in three tracks—woodlands, water, and wildlife—and is set for March 6 in Mansfield. Topics in the tracks range from managing tree galls to using drones, mitigating algal blooms to managing geese, conserving birds to helping bumble bees. Check out the full list of topics and speakers.
Wouter Stellaard, animal programs training director at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, presents “Zoo Animal Behavior and Training” from 5:30–6:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 24, in the Animal Sciences Arena in the Animal Science Building on Ohio State’s Columbus campus. Admission is free and open to the public. The host is the Human-Animal Interactions Club, which is the undergraduate student arm of our college’s Center for Human-Animal Interactions Research and Education (or CHAIRE).
Why was Rudolph’s nose so bright? Science might have an answer. Our CFAES Stories website offers you shiny facts about reindeer. (Photo: Getty Images.)
“The great size and beauty of the Wild Turkey, its value as a delicate and highly prized article of food, and the circumstance of its being the origin of the domestic race … render it one of the most interesting of the birds indigenous to the United States of America.” — naturalist and artist John James Audubon in his classic Birds of America, published in sections between 1827 and 1838.
Read Audubon’s full entry on the turkey.
Get the inside, outsized story on how Audubon’s epic tome came to be — what’s a double-elephant folio? — in writer Erin McCarthy’s “The Book So Big It Needed Its Own Furniture” published by Mental Floss. (Image by Audubon from the book, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.)
CFAES wildlife specialist Marne Titchenell presents “Common Frogs and Snakes of Ohio” from 10:30-11:30 a.m. Thursday, Sept. 20, in the Gwynne Conservation Area at Farm Science Review. It’s a look at your small, shy, helpful neighbors — American toads, green frogs, garter snakes and others — and the good they do for farms, yards and gardens. See the full Gwynne schedule. (Photo: Leopard frog, Getty Images.)
In August, parts of Tuscarawas and Holmes counties in northern Ohio were declared Disease Surveillance Areas for Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), a fatal, easily spreadable illness of deer, elk, moose and caribou.
What does the declaration mean for deer farmers and deer hunters in those areas? What does the disease threat mean for Ohio hunters in general, including those who may travel to hunt in other states or in Canada?
Get answers to those questions in “Chronic Wasting Disease in White Tailed Deer,” a talk from 10:30-11 a.m. Wednesday, Sept. 19, in the Gwynne Conservation Area at next week’s CFAES-sponsored Farm Science Review.
See the full Gwynne schedule. (Photo: White-tailed deer, Getty Images.)
Visitors to CFAES’s Farm Science Review, set for Sept. 18-20, can hop a free shuttle to the Gwynne Conservation Area, pictured below, home to nearly 70 acres of ponds, woods, prairies and a stream.
Called the Gwynne for short, it’s a perfect setting for more than 50 free talks and demonstrations on conservation, including trees, fish, soils, grasslands, water and wildlife.
Topics will range from bees to bats, chainsaw safety to year-round grazing, harvesting timber to making maple syrup.
One demonstration will even feature “electrofishing,” a method used by scientists to sample the fish in a lake or stream.
Find out more. (Photo: CFAES.)