Learn the basics for encouraging wildlife in your own backyard and contributing to scientific data right from your garden. Questions answered include ‘what is a habitat’, and what makes a ‘wildlife-friendly garden’. We will explore the concept of citizen science and how the public, even the novice gardener, can contribute to scientific research. Our course will culminate with the opportunity to contribute to a citizen science project monitoring birds that visit our green spaces.

Early naturalists of the 18th and 19th centuries left us with volumes of great plant and animal natural history information based on early explorations of “the New World”. Ironically, they left precious little information about the breeding biology of the Carolina Parakeet. Researchers continue to probe historic documents, and collections, and occasionally make new discoveries. We discovered a set of three eggs in our unarchived holdings at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences in 2018, for example. In this program, John will discuss what we know, and don’t know, about this extinct parakeet and relate this to some of the species’ tropical relatives.

The talk will be covering birds that are frequently seen in spring migration, with particular attention to birds that have been photographed right in the Triangle. The primary birds discussed will be warblers, both resident and migrants.