Categories
Buzz Flash

Georgia Butterfly Brochure

Do you want to know who is who in your pollinator garden? Well now you can thanks to The North American Butterfly Association ( Georgia- Piedmont Chapter), who have teamed up with Dr. Jaret Daniels and Monarchs acrossGeorgia to create a Georgia butterfly brochure.

With funding from Georgia State Parks & Historic Sites and the U.S Fish & Wildlife Service, This brochure is a step by step guide on how to properly identify butterflies.

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Knowing which butterflies are in your local area will help you, help them, by becoming informed about the butterflies specific host plants, and life cycles. This step by step guide is  broken up into three categories; brushfoots, whites/sulphurs/skippers, and swallowtails so that you can easily  identify butterflies in your local pollinator gardens!

Download the brochure here and start identifying your garden’s visitors today!

 

Co-blogged by GAPP + Jataysia Daniels, Greening Youth Foundation & Atlanta Botanical Garden Conservation Intern!

Categories
Buzz Flash

Native Milkweed Sale

Are you looking to expand your Monarch habitat? Look no further! The Blue Heron Nature Preserve is hosting a Georgia native milkweed plant and seed sale this Saturday, June 6th from 10am-noon at 4055 Roswell Rd. Various plant species and seeds will be available for purchase, and you can also pick up fresh-baked goodies, shade-grown coffee, and tips for making the most out of your garden. We hope to see you there!

Categories
Citizen GAPP

Citizen Science: How to Get Involved

There are other ways to get involved helping out your native pollinators besides providing them with habitat. You can also assist them by helping scientists!  Researchers are studying pollinators to learn more about their foraging, nesting behaviors, cleptoparasitic behaviors, overwintering, etc. and they can use this knowledge to help conserve and protect pollinator species. It takes a lot of time to collect data, but you can help by reporting what you see from your own yard! This is called citizen science when volunteers report data to the scientists who are conducting the study.  Citizen science is often used when a project needs data from a large area, such as tracking monarch butterfly migration.

The links provided below are places where you can go and look to see if citizen science is something that you would be interested in doing. If you have a pollinator garden already, observing the species that you see there can be another great way to help your pollinators!

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“Bee on Redbud” Photo Credit: Sarah Meadows

The North American Butterfly Association is a place where you can submit your butterfly sightings. If you do not know the species names, you can submit a species and they have scientists that can identify the species for you.  They will use the data to study butterfly conservation and distribution. http://www.nababis.org/   They also have another option for observing butterflies; this option is for people who are able to commit a few hours at a site and count every butterfly that they see.  http://naba.org/butter_counts.html

The University of Minnesota is conducting a study about monarch butterflies. They are asking for long-term studies of sites containing milkweed plants or just reports of sightings of adult butterflies.  http://www.mlmp.org/default.aspx

If bees are what you are interested in studying, this site is a great place to go. They are partnered with the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation.  You need to have access to a camera to participate in this citizen science project; the pictures of bees that you take will be examined by species to verify the species.  http://www.bumblebeewatch.org/contents/about/

Native ladybugs species are decreasing, and this study is dedicated to studying them and seeing their distribution. They are also asking participants to take pictures of the ladybugs they find.  http://www.lostladybug.org/index.php