I'm Senior Instructor of Biological Anthropology at the university.

The taxonomic groups with which I'm most familiar are either extinct or, with but one exception among the extant groups, do not occur natively in Ohio. Actually, the one group I know best can easily be considered an invasive species.

We live on a parcel of 1 1/2 acres in an area not quite rural, not quite suburban. We cultivate a good deal of the land in gardens--flower, fruit tree and vegetable--and are working towards allowing much of the rest to go "wild." We have several long term projects planned or initiated to build small gardens of native grasses and other native plants which we will allow to spread from year to year. Our goal is to make much of the parcel as friendly to native wildlife as possible and to reduce our carbon footprint as much as is reasonable.

Although we're interested in any native critter that comes our way, we measure our success informally by monitoring our ability to attract and host Eastern Bluebirds (especially in the face of a blight of invasive bird species), Monarch Butterflies (the larvae of which we capture and raise to maturity in a predator-free area), and as many species of toads and frogs as possible.

Most, but not all, of the observations I post here will be documenting the fauna and flora we attract and host on our small parcel of land in north east Ohio.

My user name is a reference to the lovely closing passage of Darwin's Origin of Species--"There is grandeur in this view of life..."--which, in the first copy I owned, occurred on page 374.