I’ve had a lot of years to collect Christmas tree ornaments. Looking at the tree this year, I realize I have amassed quite a biodiversity of animals. So, what’s a naturalist to do, but inventory them? Because many are mere suggestions of animals, we can’t get down to species for most of them, but I’ll give classification my best shot. Ready? Alright, let’s go — Kingdom – Animalia Phylum – Echinodermata Class – Echinoidea…

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  “We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” William A. Anders, Lunar Module Pilot, Apollo 8   Earthrise – December 24, 1968  (William A. Anders, NASA)   Wishing you and our small planet health, love, and peace this season, and beyond.  -K~

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Yesterday Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued a formal apology to the Inuit and Innu people of Newfoundland and Labrador. The apology was for the government’s role in removing generations of Inuit and Innu children from their homes during the early and mid 20th Century and sending them to residential schools under the guise of providing education that would better prepare them for life. Instead those children were  physically, mentally, and sexually abused; made to be…

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Yesterday I had the immense pleasure of being interviewed by editor and writer Adrienne Montgomerie for a blog post on Sci/Why: Who Writes for Science Centres and Museums, and How? “There are words everywhere at museums and science centres: on the walls, in the guide books, in their newsletters, blog posts, and marketing materials, in the visitor activities and kids’ clubs, and in the audio guides and press releases. And that’s just the stuff the public…

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As a next step towards the 150 Acts of Reconciliation challenge that I wrote about previously, I went to visit the Arthur Child Heritage Museum in Gananoque, ON. Act 12 — Visit your local museum, particularly its section on Indigenous people. If it does not have one, ask the staff why not. The museum website says — Experience 10,000 years of 1000 Islands history: our permanent, interactive displays invite visitors to explore the 1000 Islands…

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What do those four things have to do with each other?   First, as some of you know, I have applied for my Canadian citizenship. I’ve lived here as permanent resident for more than a decade and decided I have enough commitment to this country to call myself a Canadian. I will keep my US citizenship because, at root, that’s who I am (plus, yes, America really needs me as a voter!). So I’ll be…

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  Illusuak Cultural Centre, Nain, Labrador It’s Museum Week — an international social media celebration of museums and culture. Since museums are my bread and butter, I thought I would talk a bit about what I do and then catch you up on the projects I’ve been working on. For those who don’t know me, I work as a freelance interpretive writer, researcher, and occasional interpretive planner and project coordinator for various museum design firms. The…

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  It began with just an occasional ant. Big ones. One on the kitchen counter. Another in the sink. Two in the bathroom. That was early February. It was another couple weeks before I realized a movement was afoot. By March we had gone from a half dozen ants a day to scores.     A worker ant crossing my kitchen counter in search of food. This is a carpenter ant, probably Camponotus pennsylvanicus, the very…

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Some good news! Ontario has decided to end the hunting of snapping turtles. This is good news for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it never made sense to allow these animals to be hunted in the first place. As I blogged before, their meat is filled with environmental toxins, so they shouldn’t be consumed. Analysis of fat tissue samples from 12 adult turtles found that 75 percent had polychlorinated biphenol…

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