Just last week, a National Strategy to Promote the Health of Honey Bees and Other Pollinators was released.

Protecting, restoring, and enhancing habitat for bees and butterflies, including the monarch, is a major focus of this national strategy.

Read more about this on the NY Times ...

A national strategy for protecting pollinators is important, but citizens can do a lot for pollinators right in their own landscapes.

The National Geographic lists 9 ways you can help pollinators at home:
1) Go native - We Wild Ones already know that!
2) Keep it blooming - Make sure something is in bloom all season - spring, summer, and fall.
3) Save the queen - Bumblebees, unlike honey bees, leave only single queens to overwinter and start a new colony in the spring. Be sure you grow spring-blooming natives to fuel their efforts.
4) Plant milkweed - A great nectar source in addition to being the monarch's host plant.
5) Save money on mulch - About 70% of our bee species nest in the ground -- but not when it's covered with a thick layer of mulch! Leave some bare ground.
Read more of the National Geographic article ...

You can guess that one of the remaining four actions is to hold off on pesticides! One of the concerns about the National Strategy that was announced was that it doesn't go far enough in protecting pollinators from pesticides. Neonicotinoids are increasingly suspected to be problematic, and the EU has banned them for two years.

Bird statue at the Lab of Ornithology

All About Bird Biology is part of Cornell's All About Birds online resources.

This Bird Biology website has many amazing bird behavior videos.

Here are just a few of these very short (generally a minute or less) videos showcasing why birds are so fascinating:

* Why chickadees grab seeds and go
* Iridescence revealed in the feathers of an Annas hummingbird
* Cliff swallows build nests from mud
* Bowerbird decorates his nest with flowers
 

An American Lady - not every orange and black butterfly is a monarch!

Not every orange and black butterfly is a monarch!

Journey North has a great little slideshow illustrating some common monarch ID mistakes.

Now that you've sharpened your monarch ID skills, you're ready to help monarch conservation efforts by submitting your first monarch sighting to Journey North.

When will they arrive? Check out Journey North's animated map.

Exotic bush honeysuckle

This area is an abandoned USDA Soil Research Station (and briefly an Army helicopter training site). Much of it now consists of highly-degraded fields of buckthorn, honeysuckle, privet, and multiflora rose.

Volunteers have been removing some of the invasives within the last few years, but they could use some ideas about good replacements.

See http://skaak.org/the-areas/federal-farm/ for historic aerial images of the site, and http://skaak.org/the-areas/federal-farm/federal-farm-clippings/ for some history.
 
Randy will "SHOW" us what they've been doing to remove the invasives and what the result has been over the last few years, and he's interested in our "HELP" as part of this Show Me Help Me Field Trip.

Because this is public land, only licensed applicators are allowed to apply herbicides, so many of the invasives re-sprout and need to be recut over and over. It has made room for some natives to pop up on their own, but those need to be protected from herbivores, and it's only a limited number of species.
 
Dr. McGee (at June 13 trip only) will help answer the more difficult  questions and provide suggestions of his own. His Wildflower Restoration project is being done on a site (the Guppy Farm, on the other side of Gully Road) that was reforested earlier and has less of an invasive species problem, but native woodland wildflowers are absent. See more about that project at http://skaak.org/flora-2/wildflower-restoration/.

In addition to Dr. McGee, Geoff Griffiths, a Ph.D. Ecology student at SUNY-ESF, will also be our guide at both the June 13 and the June 20 programs.

Sat. June 13 at 10 am. Open to Wild Ones members. RSVP to Carol at cbieseme@twcny.rr.com.

Sat. June 20 at 10 am. Open to all. RSVP to Randy Nonenmacher at ranonenmacher@twcny.rr.com.

Details will be sent to registrants.

The most common question people have asked over the years is "Where can we get native plants?"

Central New York does seem to be behind other areas of the country in making native plants available, but each year there are more plants available, and our Native Plant Shopping Guide will tell you where to find them.

Download it for free on our website
The Guide is in three parts:

• an introduction (Download)
• plants listed by scientific name (Download)
• plants listed by common name (Download)

Or you can download the complete Guide (Introduction, List by scientific name, and List by common name).

ANSWER TO QUESTION IN GREETING ABOVE:

 
Please read the introduction! In addition to information about the vendors, it suggests guidelines for choosing plants. For example, it's beneficial to choose species rather than cultivars. The Introduction provides additional information.

New this year is a link (the asterisk in the left hand column) to a map of each plant's distribution county by county as part of the Biota of North America Program at http://bonap.net/NAPA/Genus/Traditional/County.

If you're looking for a particular plant, be sure to call ahead to be sure the vendor has them in stock on any particular day.

Thank you to our vendors for taking the time and effort to provide a list of their native plant offerings.

Special thanks to Randy Nonenmacher, Carol Biesemeyer, and Randi Starmer for their assistance.

And THANKS to all of you who choose native plants!