How much do you love your park? Maybe enough to organize or participate in a cleanup, raise or donate money to make an improvement, or lead an educational walk. Or maybe you don’t have the time or money to donate, but simply find your local park to be a refuge — and appreciate the work
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Driving through the Main Line’s older neighborhoods, you’ll find American beech trees towering above you, with smooth gray trunks, thin bark, and some with carved initials from decades past. Their broad canopies shade properties that have stood for a century or more. These slow-growing, long-lived trees are irreplaceable and central to the character of many
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Octavia Nash was back for more. She had joined a friend for a paddle on the Delaware River with Camden’s Center for Aquatic Sciences once before and returned for a free kayaking session at Pyne Poynt Park in mid-July, this time with her fiancée. “I like the peacefulness,” she says. “Oh my God, it’s like
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Iresha Picot wasn’t sure how many women would show up. It was the fifth day in a brutal stretch of summer heat, with Fourth of July fireworks having wrapped up just hours earlier. But by 10 a.m., 26 women had gathered at the Indego station at 33rd and Diamond streets for what has become their
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Maryland’s Department of Natural Resources is keeping an eye on Baltimore checkerspots. The once-common butterflies are in decline. They’re not rare enough to be endangered, but the state will be in a good position to step in if needed. In the Keystone State, no agency is tasked with ensuring their survival. The Pennsylvania Fish and
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Wanda Lebron’s garden has an open-gate policy. From morning to night, the entrance, framed by sunflowers, is left unlocked so neighbors can stop in to chat, rest or harvest a vegetable from one of the raised garden beds. But each day, Lebron wakes up knowing that she could lose everything she and her neighbors have
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Ihad expected the logs, half-deflated basketballs, plastic bottles and other assorted urban debris when I tagged along with a crew from the Philadelphia Water Department tasked with cleaning out the Fairmount Dam fishway back in 2012. What I hadn’t expected was to see the workers pull out two flathead catfish the size of toddlers. The
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On Sept. 27, 2025, a wood thrush flew past the David Rittenhouse Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania on its way to Central America. We know this because a tiny solar-powered radio transmitter on the bird’s back sent out a signal that was picked up by a receiver on the roof of the building. That
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Julian Bender spent most of his weekends in the spring and summer of 2024 dedicated to one project: creating a bikepacking route through the Pine Barrens. He mapped out campgrounds and sites of natural and historical interest. He rode drafted routes, ruling out options that weren’t suitable for bikes due to flooding or overly soft
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On a late winter-early spring evening, with a warm rain falling and temperatures above 45 degrees, volunteers with the Sourlands Conservancy in central New Jersey take up posts along nine roadways in Hopewell Township that frogs and salamanders need to cross while en route to the vernal ponds where they breed. The conditions have to
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From April 24 to April 27, Philadelphia and its adjacent counties will strive to recruit people to find as many species as possible, alongside hundreds of other cities around the world. Using the iNaturalist app as a tool, the City Nature Challenge encourages us to explore and document the biodiversity right where we live while
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