Okanagan Nature Nut: What good are mosquitos?
Ugh!! Mosquitoes! Hordes of them, buzzing in your ear and biting incessantly are a maddening nuisance. Not to mention the devastating health impacts caused by malaria, Zika and West Nile […]
Entries by Chantelle
Part 2 on the ‘fascinating night guardians’
The Okanagan’s low to mid elevation ecosystems have the greatest variety and population of bats in all of Canada because of its warm climate and diversity of terrain. Our warm […]
Okanagan Nature Nut Narrows in on Bats
It’s bat season in B.C. They’ve migrated back to B.C. or left their hibernaculas to forage for insects. Most females have babies now. There are more than 1,400 known bat […]
Fewer butterflies colour the Okanagan
They are some of the most delightfully coloured signs of spring. Some people say butterflies are like flying flowers. These important pollinators live in almost every habitat from wetlands and […]
Get Outdoors! And mingle with the microbes
Microbes are amazing! Too small to see with the naked eye, they are nature’s life forms observed through a microscope. Throughout human history, we never knew that microbes (short for […]
Get Outdoors! And build brown fat
Get Outdoors Did you know that people have brown fat? I didn’t — until recently. I knew that bears, squirrels, winter birds and other wildlife do to survive the cold […]
Get Outdoors!: and get tracking
Tracking is an exciting and marvellous way to discover wildlife in their natural environment. And snow is ideal for tracking; a record is impressed wherever wildlife move, hunt, feed, rest […]
Get Outdoors! And protect our snow
Ninety per cent of our water comes from frozen water vapour as snow. And water is amazing! It continually morphs into liquid, solid ice, vapour, rain and frozen, crystalline snow. […]
Get Outdoors!: It’s a berry merry season for Vernon songbirds
Our birds need winter berries; they’re the perfect size fruit. Resident birds that don’t migrate, but remain here year-round, need food and warmth to survive the harsh winters. Most songbirds […]
Get Outdoors! And go for a walk
For us, November is the transition from fall to winter. It can make us lazy. Animals either migrate, hibernate or insulate to survive winter’s onslaught. We’re animals too; so if […]
