Help Museums
Are you a local friend in Chautauqua County or Western New York who wants to support the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History and similar museums? Please consider emailing our New York State Senator Cathy Young and New York State Assemblyman Andy Goodell asking for their support on the Museum Education Act. Why? Currently, New York museums are the only chartered entities that receive no direct funding from the Education Department that charters them. This bill would help museums continue and expand their curriculum-based educational programming and also help school districts and...
Read MoreEastern Grass-veneer (Crambus laqueatellus)
This looks to be an Eastern Grass-veneer (Crambus laqueatellus) moth, one of those diurnal pick-ups that is only really possible thanks to following their flight once you flush them…unless you have a few hours each day to crawl around in the grass and stare at things! That actually sounds like a lot of fun, and what most of us did as children. We should probably do that as adults, too. Give it a go this weekend!
Read MoreWhat’s the Scoop on Poop?
Via the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy! Kids love poop. That’s why the Chautauqua Watershed Conservancy and the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History have teamed up to put on a family event called “What’s the Scoop on Poop?” We invite you to bring the kids in your life and join us at 10:00 AM on Saturday, June 20th at our Dobbins Woods Preserve on Bly Hill Road in Ashville, where we’ll talk about how valuable poop can be to biologists and what impacts it can have on our waters. Then we’ll take a hike to find some scat! This event is free and...
Read MoreElementary School Students Saving Birds
Last year the Audubon Alliance for Coastal Waterbirds helped to teach elementary school children about some of Connecticut’s most imperiled avian species, ensuring that they learn about why it is so important to share the shore with these conservation-priority waterbirds. Respecting wildlife is a fundamental aspect of our species stewardship of the Earth – at least if we want to survive on it! These students gave back to their world by creating wonderful, unique art to teach and inspire beachgoers as they flock to the shore for the summer. You can see some of these signs focused...
Read MoreStudents Learn that Roger Tory Peterson is “For the Birds”
He was born in Jamestown, New York more than one hundred years ago. Imagine that city one hundred years ago; no television, no computers or any of the many electronic devices that amuse us today, not even cars to take us to entertaining places like shopping malls or sports events. What would a boy like Roger do during summer vacation? “Go outside and look at nature”, answer my audience of second grade students at Love Elementary School. It’s a library class so appropriately I show them Laura Thomas’s exquisite illustrations in Peggy Thomas’s children’s biography For the Birds, The Life of...
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