We Need Your Help to Protect the Endangered Species Act! Please read this Action Alert from Ontario Nature. Sign the petition to the Ontario government here. Pictured to the left: The Spotted Turtle is one of many Endangered species in Ontario that relies on legislated habitat protection for its survival. The primary threat to most [...]
*** Update: Speaker Announcement! *** At our next meeting on Tuesday, May 27 at 7 p.m. (via Zoom) we are excited to welcome Jennifer Doubt, Curator of Botany at the Canadian Museum of Nature. Jennifer will be talking about the National Herbarium of Canada, which she manages. A herbarium (plural: ‘herbaria’) is essentially a library for plants. [...]
Editor’s Synopsis of CFN 138(1) Plus: FREE Online Access to Feature Article at https://doi.org/10.22621/cfn.v138i1.3195 The latest issue of The Canadian Field-Naturalist (CFN) should arrive soon in the physical mailboxes of those with print subscriptions. The Canadian Field-Naturalist is the official journal and publication of record for the Ottawa Field Naturalists’ Club (OFNC). The current issue [...]
Bird Safe Campus Summit February 26, 2025 - #BSCS25 You’ve likely heard some variation of the proverb “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors. We borrow it from our children.” This speaks to our obligation to look after the environment — the land, the water, the skies, and all of their inhabitants. A [...]
OFNC Book Club Reads: The End of Eden by Adam Welz Instead of ‘climate change’ or ‘global warming,’ South African naturalist and writer Adam Welz prefers the term ‘global weirding’. The ecological disaster of our times is both unprecedented and strange, a maddening demonstration of ‘the butterfly effect’ where snow melt in the Arctic changes [...]
The 106th Ottawa-Gatineau CBC was held December 15, 2024. Temperatures ranged from -14.9 to -6.4 degrees Celsius, skies were most cloudy, with only a few centimetres of snow on the ground; waterways were partly frozen. 171 field observers plus 25 feeder watchers found 77 species and a 42,855 individual birds. The most abundant bird was, [...]
OFNC Book Club Reads: Bitch by Lucy Cooke What do albatrosses, whiptail lizards, and meerkats have in common? The females of these species are all used by writer and zoologist Lucy Cooke to demonstrate that, when it comes to the sexes, even the field of evolutionary biology has a few biases that need debunking. In the [...]
Are you a nature lover and a book lover? Would an OFNC-run Book Club that focuses on new titles in natural history interest you? We would be grateful for your thoughts in this short survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdbvEG4mXwYDOBjdY_1lvHC3K-0C9P682a2i_72l5JvBEqc0w/viewform?usp=sf_link The survey will run until June 15, 2024, so be sure to submit your responses before then. Thank you!
Report: Field trip May 7 on Dolman Ridge Road There was a surprisingly large turnout on the field trip/ bird walk on the Dolman Ridge Road; close to 20 people were present. Brilliant sunshine and coolish temperatures accompanied our very pleasant walk, even if it was a bit breezy at times. Bird diversity was surprisingly [...]
This Wednesday, March 2, the City of Ottawa’s official recommendation for the Brian Coburn Boulevard extension will be presented to the Transportation Committee. The meeting will begin at 9:30 AM. Staff will be recommending the route known as “Option 7”, despite the serious habitat fragmentation and ecological disruption this would cause in the Greenbelt. This [...]
