KU Professor to help send monarchs into space
By RON SYLVESTER
The Wichita Eagle
(published in Kansas City Star on Nov. 16, 2009)
http://www.kansas.com
http://www.monarchwatch.org/space
LAWRENCE, Kan. – (By Ron Sylvester) Chip Taylor is used to people giving him strange looks.
As director of Monarch Watch and professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas, [...]
One of the highlights of the annual fall open house at Monarch Watch is Butterfly School, in which Chip Taylor, founder and director of Monarch Watch, demonstrates how to catch, hold, tag and release a Monarch butterfly before it begins its migration to its winter home in Mexico.
The weather for this fall’s event (Sept. 12) was [...]
My garden is a hang-out for bees of all kinds — honey bees, native bees, carpenter bees. I love watching them going about their business and am glad to help out keeping them fed. Bees are important pollinators. Pollination is essential for most of our food crops.
The honey bee population has dropped dramatically in recent years, and scientists [...]
Every day, I watch the progress of the Black Swallowtail (BST) caterpillars on my huge bronze fennel plant, which is home to a lot of other insects, including this character (see photo) who seemed to be hanging out and doing nothing while sitting on a fennel flower. Very suspicious. I thought he was up to [...]
My friend Anita, who lives in Canberra, emailed me this story. We traveled together in Tasmania in January of this year and saw these poppy fields, and we saw wallabies lounging in rutabaga fields, but we didn’t get to see this!
Stoned wallabies make crop circles
Thu Jun 25, 2009 1:30pm EDT
SYDNEY (Reuters) – The mystery of [...]
A crab spider grabbed a honey bee that visited a common milkweed flower.
In the Midwest, Master Gardener J. G. has planted a complete banquet for pollinating insects, such as bees and butterflies. There are plants for all stages in an insect’s life. One section of her garden is devoted to native prairie plants, such as the common [...]
Kookaburra Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree
Merry merry king of the bush is he
Laugh Kookaburra, laugh Kookaburra
Gay your life must be
Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree
Eating all the gumdrops he can see
Stop Kookaburra, stop Kookaburra
Leave some gums for me
Kookaburra sits on the old gum tree
Counting all the [...]
My friends and I fell in love with Tasmanian Devils, irascible carnivorous marsupials that live in the wild only on the island of Tasmania, an Australian state south of the mainland of Australia.
In the wild, Tasmanian Devils usually are only active at night, when they hunt or seek out carrion. They can be very nasty-tempered and make a huge [...]
When my friend Anita told me we could tour Tasmania when we visited her and her husband in Australia, I thought: “Great, I can see some Tasmanian Devils.”
I told my daughter (she stayed behind) about the itinerary that included these irascible marsupials, and then I added, “The Tasmanian Devils are dying out.” Just to say that made both [...]
Avoid the sun. Wear sunblock. That’s my summer mantra. Now that I’ve had some skin cancer removed, I’m even more paranoid about sun exposure.
The darkest time of the year is here, so you’d think I could relax about sun exposure as I enter my annual winter hermit state, covered up and shivering by the hearth. But no, I [...]
