Snowflake Challenge #5
Jan. 9th, 2023 11:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kiki_engIn your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom or like many people at the moment, fannishly adrift right now) Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.
iNaturalist "is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. It's also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool." (What is it, 2022.)
I use iNaturalist for that, and also for creative projects. Sometimes I filter all of the observations that have been made globally to find out something like what the most common birds recorded in January in Seoul are, or I'll filter all of the photos of a species by their photo licensing type if I want to find a reference to use.
I can also search for sounds and find a cricket on Jeju Island in September. The songs of birds, insects, and amphibians vary by region and season. iNaturalist can be used as a tool to help you find the right bird song to include in your podfic, whether your characters are birders or not. You can know that your wildlife sounds are accurate, whether or not anyone else does.
InsectSingers.com is another great resource. It has "[s]ong recordings and information on acoustically signaling insects, especially cicadas of the United States and Canada." - there's a lot of variation in cicada song between species. You can listen to a sampling of different songs here to get a bit of an idea.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library is a good resource for photos, audio, and video recordings of birds, and you can find a lot of amphibian sound recordings there, too, because some frog sounds are pretty similar to bird sounds. The Cornell Lab also has eBird and Merlin, which are both useful for exploring birds and bird identification.
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is an excellent resource if you're into invertebrates, birds*, gardening, or life on this planet. They're an international nonprofit focused on science-based conservation work. Among other things they've got region-based guides for protecting pollinators and publications on things like mosquito management, conserving plant stems for native bees, and insectary cover cropping in California. If you want to write a character into these things, or if you're interested in these things yourself, Xerces is a good place to start.
*roughly 96% of terrestrial birds feed their young insects (Are declines in insects and insectivorous birds related?, 2021)
iNaturalist "is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. It's also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool." (What is it, 2022.)
I use iNaturalist for that, and also for creative projects. Sometimes I filter all of the observations that have been made globally to find out something like what the most common birds recorded in January in Seoul are, or I'll filter all of the photos of a species by their photo licensing type if I want to find a reference to use.
I can also search for sounds and find a cricket on Jeju Island in September. The songs of birds, insects, and amphibians vary by region and season. iNaturalist can be used as a tool to help you find the right bird song to include in your podfic, whether your characters are birders or not. You can know that your wildlife sounds are accurate, whether or not anyone else does.
InsectSingers.com is another great resource. It has "[s]ong recordings and information on acoustically signaling insects, especially cicadas of the United States and Canada." - there's a lot of variation in cicada song between species. You can listen to a sampling of different songs here to get a bit of an idea.
The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library is a good resource for photos, audio, and video recordings of birds, and you can find a lot of amphibian sound recordings there, too, because some frog sounds are pretty similar to bird sounds. The Cornell Lab also has eBird and Merlin, which are both useful for exploring birds and bird identification.
The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is an excellent resource if you're into invertebrates, birds*, gardening, or life on this planet. They're an international nonprofit focused on science-based conservation work. Among other things they've got region-based guides for protecting pollinators and publications on things like mosquito management, conserving plant stems for native bees, and insectary cover cropping in California. If you want to write a character into these things, or if you're interested in these things yourself, Xerces is a good place to start.
*roughly 96% of terrestrial birds feed their young insects (Are declines in insects and insectivorous birds related?, 2021)
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Date: 2023-01-10 04:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-11 01:47 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-10 07:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-11 01:54 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-10 07:25 am (UTC)Thank you for such a great list.
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Date: 2023-01-11 02:00 am (UTC)Thanks for commenting. :)
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Date: 2023-01-10 05:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-11 02:13 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-10 06:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-01-11 02:13 am (UTC)Yes ...
Date: 2023-01-11 12:13 pm (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2023-01-11 11:48 pm (UTC)Yeah. The native plants that you put in that enable native caterpillars and birds to complete their lifecycles will also enable things like parasitic wasps and flies to complete their lifecycles. You'll be supporting a whole complex food web that - with the exception of outbreaks of invasive species like the spongy moth (Lymantria dispar) - should be able to get along just fine without intervention; plant damage is unlikely to be particularly evident, so, you probably don't need to be that proactive with picking caterpillars off of things.
If you're annoyed at the caterpillars in your garden the best cure for that may be learning what butterflies and moths and sawflies they turn into. The Caterpillar Lab in New Hampshire has some good resources linked and also in their shop - I'm a big fan of their matching caterpillar and moth playing card decks(, though shipping costs to Canada are prohibitive so I've not actually seen them in person).
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2023-01-12 02:40 am (UTC)The last couple of years, I've seen lots of blue-winged wasps, which are very pretty parasites of something or other. People don't seem to know a lot about them, but they belong to a group of parasitic wasps, so are considered beneficial. At minimum, they eat Japanese beetle and june bug grubs, so that's cool. I usually see them on sedum and garlic chives.
Re: Yes ...
Date: 2023-01-13 04:45 am (UTC)Re: Yes ...
Date: 2023-01-13 05:04 am (UTC)They appear on my garlic chives and sedum amidst swarms of other small parasitic wasps and native bees.