I found a beautiful moth today that I suspect may be a once-married underwing moth. If i’m correct and someone can back me up on it, it will become the 10th observation of that species in my state to ever be posted to iNat. I’m so excited and I hope i’m right :D
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The botanist found a remnant population of Moraea aristata in an unmown neglected corner in the grounds around the Observatory. Built up enough bulbs to plant out. Found a suitable place on Rondebosch Common.
He came to speak to our garden club. My Fynbos Rambles go to the Common a few times each year. Wonderful to see that introduced population spreading beyond the spots where they were planted. And they could, so easily, have been mown down, and vanished!
https://www.capetownbotanist.com/moraea-aristata-new-home-rondebosch-common/
https://eefalsebay.blogspot.com/2018/10/spring-flowers-rondebosch-common-smitswinkel-september.html
Then Erica verticillata extinct in the wild. Collected from international botanical gardens … and planted back at Tokai. A living memorial to a different botanist.
And the - we thought it was extinct - rediscovered by Mr Fab, currently busy with his doctorate. Also a list of his species novum being described and published.
This year, Cape Town finally agreed not to mow verges, where people can motivate to protect spring flowers.
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(we/us pronouns)
We were reading on our city’s parks department web site today about recent restoration work on wetland buffers and oak savannahs. Additionally, one of the city’s firefighters is also a beekeeper and convinced the city to replace the fire department’s turf lawn with a pollinator garden.
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“hayaan ang kalikasan maging iyong guro” = “let Nature be your teacher” - an umbrella project to include various nature-related activities. Started in 2020 for kids (6 to 13 yrs), initially to bridge those pandemic-restricted-no-school-months, later to support the dull science modules with tangible experience.
So we go out in small groups to discover and observe, learning to respect Nature instead of careless exploitation.
Activities include raising butterflies (papilionidae) and moths (sphingidae), finding and identifying edible wild and cultivated plants, releasing baby sea turtles (http://pawikanpatrol.com/capacity-building.html), etc.
It is encouraging to see that the number of participants has steadily increased: depending on the assignments, parents and grand-parents and especially members of local minority are getting more involved and contribute their knowledge - success on a small scale.
The biggest success? 2018 - when we (i.e. local community members, friends and supporters from academic and political circles) could convince the respective Regional and National government units to re-align a section of a National road, thus saving a sea turtle nesting beach from inevitable destruction by road works (http://pawikanpatrol.com/our-story-from-past-to-present.html).
So, @astra_the_dragon, I hope that this and all contributed stories will help to lift your spirit - as long as there are people out there to care and take action on whatever small scale, not all is black!
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Not my project, but I have to mention it because of the amount of work that is being done to save the subspecies. https://www.helpingrhinos.org/news/494/three-new-northern-white-embryos-produced
Back in July, they collected more osteocytes from Fatu, one of two remaining Northern White Rhinos left in the world. They flew these back to Germany and successfully created 3 more embryos, now making the total number of northern white rhino embryos, 12. If all goes well, they can be implanted into southern white rhinos, left to gestate, and the southern white rhinos will birth their northern counterparts, hopefully starting the long road to recovering the subspecies from extinction.
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The most positive story I know from UK is the Knepp project in Sussex. Basically a long-term failure of arable farming was fenced off, some pigs and large herbivores put in, and they waited to see what happened. They now have large population of turtle doves (declining rapidly in UK), ditto nightingales, purple emperor butterflies. There is a book about it called Wilding by Isabella Tree and plenty on their website. They get criticised by some rewilding purists because they don’t have top predators, but for Sussex (intensively farmed and large human population) what they have done is close to miraculous.
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I’m growing new england aster seedlings to plant in the wild since they’re native and endangered here in Georgia (I just moved from Pennsylvania), and yesterday I planted a swamp milkweed seedling in the wild where it’ll hopefully continue to grow and thrive, to help monarch butterflies :) I’m also growing purple coneflower and purple passionflower seedlings to do the same with, and whenever I find seeds for other native host or flowering plants, I’ll do the same with them!
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Long story short: last year there was a tornado in my condo complex, no people were injured, but several large trees were uprooted. A local arborist was consulted about which had to be removed. After he gave his advice, he said there was no charge because he wanted to help as a neighbor. The tree cutting company did charge, but a very fair price.
However afterwards, there were all these holes and all these piles of wood chips from where the stumps were ground. The Home Owner’s Association had no money left for landscaping.
No problem. Who needs a gym membership! We had a wheelbarrow and shovels and used the wood chips to fill in the holes and had some left over to mulch by the curb. Then we used some stimulus money to buy hundreds of daffodil bulbs and some tulips. Hooray!
The story continues with twenty-five donated trees planted this spring. Also this year my husband and I got permission to put in two pollinator flowerbeds in common areas in addition to the eroded hillside we’d already adopted. Neighbors are continuing to water the gardens and donate extra plants. Brighten the corner where you are!
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Just gotta say, I LOVE this topic! I love reading about the different niches of success and the wider swaths of success. Each story is a revelation - of caring, of love, of concern, of understanding, and of activism. Very nice.
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Grow don’t mow. Now we know, wait until mid-November so the annuals can set seeds for next year.
https://www.news24.com/news24/southafrica/local/peoples-post/on-the-verge-of-a-breakthrough-20210906
Peta Brom is on iNat https://www.inaturalist.org/people/petabrom
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Hoping your verges are not engulfed in invasive species as our roadsides are…here we have to mow to keep them from leaving the roads and invading our property. But in doing that we find our ditches are rich in biodiversity, and, in the pushing the non-native plants back towards the road, have a place where many people now come to walk. They love the “pretty wildflowers” (alive with life and diversity), and are astonished when I tell them the plants are native and what could be everywhere! People here used to rip out every bit of vegetation when they bought and built on a property here. Thanks to our educational efforts, people are starting to understand that they can reduce light pollution, mow less, leave trees, and protect water by leaving greenbelts. I believe every individual, can make positive changes. Some won’t but many will. Every square inch of ground is important, and humans, simply by changing the way they see the world or redefining what they think is beautiful can do SO much good.
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Our verges have Paterson’s Curse - but we also have daisies, bulbs and orchids.
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It’s so easy to feel hopeless.
I live outside Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.
The Ash trees are coming back.
Not just young ones that haven’t been targets for Emerald Ash Borer yet, but the surviving mature trees that showed significant canopy dieback have spent the past 2-3 years greening up again so much that it can be hard to tell they were once fighting for their lives. Even green ash is looking better.
I used to put rare decent-looking ash trees on iNat to make a note of them but I don’t bother anymore. There are too many.
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(She/They)
I get that, the world is pretty shitty and people seem to not care (well, not enough).
Currently working on a paper for a huge range extension for some cave species in Spain. Should be submitted soon, hopefully published by end of the year. Recently (2018/2019 though, sorry), good range extension for an endangered cave shrimp here in Alabama (https://subtbiol.pensoft.net/article/38280/ ) . And groundwater pollution is a huge issue so this is awesome news.
Personally, we were able to get some acreage for a home eventually but of course most of it will stay natural forest, some wetland, and even meadow. For a small area, it has a huge habitat variation and I’m working on IDing everything I can find on it (most of my iNat stuff is from there, I’m making a ‘guidebook’ for our own spot of land, because of course!) and we finally this year confirmed not one - but TWO - bobcats! And one we have good clues to it’s range/hunting route! So I’m super excited and although we arent really in the range for black bear…I can cross my fingers and hope that they will make it down in our life time because they are slowly moving down the mountain range we are at the very southern end of.
We got the land from someone who got to old to care for it, so imagine about a decade of trash outside the ‘house’ with holes in the wall and workshop of same…we have gotten two HUGE (biggest they make) dumpsters of trash gone, repaired what we can, recycled what we can (lot of metal scrap junk piles as you’d expect at a old southern backwoods country homesite) and I swear I can physically feel & hear the land sigh a relief it is being cared for again. It has the start of a branch to a pretty important river, so cleaning it up is worth it all the more <3 I’m sure eventually I’ll find something threatened or endangered. For now, just focusing on making sure there are no invasive species and clearing out old trash. Most of it, is gorgeous and I can’t wait to see the forest mature even more. (PS - anyone know any good places to get some blight resistant American Chestnuts…we’d like to try, we have a good location for them that we plan to re-forest anyway!)
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I relate to how you feel. Just recently I read Clive Hamilton’s courageous re-phrasing of what is happening in his “Defiant Earth”, (published in 2017). Not that that will make you feel better. I mention it because it is helping me come to terms with the goodness of humans as well as their greed and stupidity. When I’ve got my head and heart around that, then I may be able to figure out how best to use the time I have left.
My success story is taking place in Australia. When I started in Fungi in 2011, there were barely any sources of info that an amateur could learn from, and no one on my ground that knew anything. Peole called me the crazy fungi lady. The few sources that I could find include Tom Volk and the Fungi of California website.
Now, ten years later, we have at least five Facebook groups dedicated to local, national and neighborhood (Neighborhood referring to nearest countries geographically) fungi with thousands of members looking out for specimens to record, get IDed and show off. In depth discussions on habitat, how to maximise, how to save rare species.
We have Landcare groups include fungi in their considerations, we have workshops featuring fungi, we have nature photographers specialising in fungi, pre-covid fungi festivals attended by thousands instead of a couple of hundred. These translate into many many more people aware of need for habitat. More people signing Landcare and Bushcare petitions to save habitat. Many more people signing up for Land for Wildlife, and Bioblitzing their properties, recording whatever species they can find.
There’s the rise of iNaturalist and the Atlas of Living Australia that people are populating. Projects like Cities & Trees, Community Gardens, Bird Buddies, Birds in Backyards, Nestboxes for Owls, Butterfly Gardens and others are all helping to engage more people into looking after nature.
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Not a personal success but I heard a couple of days ago that, according to a survey carried out by the British Dragonfly Society, 19 of the 46 resident and regular migrant dragonfly and damselfly species in the UK increased in number in 2021 over 2020 and only 5 species have declined.
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I think it is over a longer period. I heard the spokeswoman say they don’t have information for 2021 yet.
I’m not sure what they meant by increased. It could be an increase in an index of abundance at certain monitored sites, or they may be talking about presence/absence data in map squares. I suspect it is the latter, as she put the increase down to climate warming enabling species to spread northwards. It is probably on their web site in full detail.
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You are right. Thank you for the correction. I knew the full report was for a longer period but I had heard a third party extract which implied that particular statistic was for the last year. I checked the report itself and see that it is not.
As with many of these statistics which are not the result of scientific studies, it’s largely based on sightings by large numbers of individuals so can also be influenced by the number of people taking an interest. Climate change is an influencing factor in the spread northwards but that cannot happen without suitable habitat so either way it is positive news for dragonflies.
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