Nature PEI

• Saturday May 14 – Allisary Creek Impoundment Birding Field Trip. Nature PEI and Birding on PEI bird field trip to fresh water marsh, saltmarsh, and field habitats in the Mount Stewart Wildlife Management Area. Participants can meet at the Indigo Parking area in Charlottetown at 8:00 AM and car pool from there to Mount Stewart or meet at Hillsborough River Eco-Centre in Mount Stewart at 8:30 AM. Please register with Dan McAskill at jdmcaskill@pei.sympatico.ca or at 902-393-4385. Please bring your binoculars! The field trip leader will be at the interpretive centre and that those car pooling at Indigo will have to self identify for travel to Mount Stewart.
  (Note – this field trip will be offered the following day as well on Sunday May 15 – again please register with Dan in advance)

Time and a Place: An Environmental History
of Prince Edward Island
Edward MacDonald, Irene Novaczek, and Joshua MacFadyen, editors
Co-published with McGill-Queens University Press

Table of Contents and Introduction
Editors
Contributors

Time and a Place tracks PEI’s changes from the Ice Age to the Information Age. Putting PEI at the forefront of Canadian environmental history, It is a remarkable work that illuminates the numerous forces that shape and change ecosystems.
With its long and well-documented history, Prince Edward Island makes a compelling
case study for thousands of years of human interaction with a specific ecosystem. The pastoral landscapes, red sandstone cliffs, and small fishing villages of Canada’s “garden province” are appealing because they appear timeless, but they are as culturally constructed as they are shaped by the ebb and flow of the tides.
Bringing together experts from a multitude of disciplines, the essays in Time and
a Place explore the island’s marine and terrestrial environment from its prehistory
to its recent past. Beginning with PEI’s history as a blank slate – a land scraped
by ice and then surrounded by rising seas – this mosaic of essays documents the
arrival of flora, fauna, and humans, and the different ways these inhabitants have
lived in this place over time.

Nature PEI’s guest speaker on Tuesday, May 3, 2016, will be Caleb Harding, a UPEI student who studied and sorted specimens collected through the PEI Spider Project. Caleb just completed his third year in Environmental Biology at UPEI. As part of his third year studies, he was trained in spider taxonomy, specifically for the PEI Spider Project, and sorted initial specimens to Family before being sent to a spider specialist for further identification. A native of Summerville, PEI, Caleb has had a lifelong interest in natural history, and followed any nature projects that were offered in school, 4-H, and Scouts. Prior to the PEI Spider Project, Caleb participated in several natural history surveys, including dragonflies, butterflies and moths, ladybugs, bumblebees, tiger beetles, salamanders and frogs. Through these studies, he collected first provincial records for dragonflies, butterflies, and ladybugs, as well as having collected some of the first PEI specimens of the Pickerel Frog. Caleb’s presentation will provide an overview of the PEI Spider Project, and share some highlights and surprises from the field. His presentation will help us understand how the preliminary findings further the knowledge of our PEI spiders, and consider potential next steps. Tuesday, May 3rd , at 7:30PM The Carriage House at Beaconsfield Corner of West and Kent Streets in Charlottetown Admission is free and all are welcome.

 The Messenger is a highly-regarded, important Canadian film starring Canadian birds that portrays the plight of our birds today.

City Cinema in Charlottetown will be showing it for four nights from Friday April 29^th til Monday May 2^{nd 2016}.  http://citycinema.net/

Please take your family members along.

John Klymko: Maritimes Butterfly Atlas – what six years of surveying have shown us

Nature PEI’s guest speaker on Tuesday, April 5th, 2016, will be John Klymko, director of the Maritimes Butterfly Atlas.

John is a zoologist who specializes in insects. In addition to running the Maritimes Butterfly Atlas John has also conducted surveys for dragonflies, pollinators, and other insects of conservation interest throughout the Maritimes.

John grew up in southern Ontario where he attended the University of Guelph to do his MSc in fly taxonomy. In 2009 he moved to the Maritimes to work as the zoologist at the Atlantic Canada Conservation Data Centre, a not for profit whose mission is to assemble and provide objective and understandable data and support decision-making, research, and education in Atlantic Canada.

John’s presentation will detail the results of Maritimes Butterfly Atlas, which had its sixth and final field season in 2015. He will discuss how the project has improved the understanding of butterfly conservation in PEI and the Maritimes, how the project will allow for the monitoring of changes in butterfly distribution in the future, and what’s in store for the project in the next few years.

Tuesday, April 5^th at 7:30PM

The Carriage House at Beaconsfield

Corner of West and Kent Streets in Charlottetown

Admission is free and all are welcome.

Media Contact:

John Klymko

jklymko@mta.ca

Tuesday March 1st 2016 – If you build it, will they pass? Exploring issues of fish passage in PEI rivers and streams. Sean Landsman will be the guest speaker for the Society’s meeting which starts at 7:30 PM at Beaconsfield’s Carriage House, corner of West and Kent, Charlottetown. Not only a scientist but a photographer of note, his talk will be richly illustrated.