There are over two hundred different species of sliders, and most of them reside in the Americas. These turtles are recognizably different from one another, with some having red or orange markings on their shells and heads. In this blog post, we will explore four things you likely haven’t heard of about red-eared sliders. From […]
Tag: caterpillars

Frogs That Can Make Your Garden Grow and How to Naturally Attract Them
Frogs are beneficial wildlife to have in the garden. They are one of the best animals to have around really. They signal that the environment you’ve created is clean because they can’t survive in polluted environments. They have diets that are perfect for the gardener, naturally helping with pest control. And, like any wild animal, […]

Large blue butterfly numbers soar in Britain
The large blue butterfly has enjoyed its best summer for 150 years in Britain thanks to targeted restoration work, which is also benefiting other rare insects including the rugged oil beetle and the shrill carder bee. The butterfly, which became extinct in Britain in 1979 but was reintroduced via caterpillars from Sweden four years later, […]

From 300,000 rabbits to none: a Southern Ocean island is reborn
On a world map, Macquarie Island is a speck in the Southern Ocean, but for ecologists it is a beacon, illuminating a future for grand-scale environmental recovery projects. Melissa Houghton first set foot on the 34km-long green streak as a dog handler in late 2011. Rabbits, cats, rats and mice had been introduced by sealers […]

Petition: Western Monarch Butterflies Near Extinction With Less than 2000 Reported in this Year’s Thanksgiving Count
The state of our planet’s pollinators took a big blow in 2020. The annual Thanksgiving count of Western Monarch butterflies this year by the Xerces Society yielded less than 2000 individuals, a tragic threshold that has experts worried about the future of the species. In the 1980s, as many as 3 to 10 million Monarch […]

Eastern Tailed Blue Butterfly
My favorite detail is the ringed antennae, alternately black and white. Pretty! Also note that it has a small thin “tail” on each hindwing; when perched the butterfly typically moves its hind wings and the tails move up and down. The butterfly also sports three orange dots on the lower surface of the hindwing. Eastern […]
A Four-toothed Mason Wasp
This lovely wasp can be found drinking nectar at flowers throughout the eastern United States right now. It is a good wasp to have around the garden because the females round up leaf-rolling caterpillars — the kinds that eat your plants — to provision their nests. When it is time to reproduce, the female wasp […]