Friends of Steele Creek Nature Center and Park

We are very fortunate to have John Pickering as our special guest for Wildlife Weekend at Steele Creek Park on October 11th and 12th. 

On Friday night (10/11)at 7:00 pm, he will give a brief talk about Discover Life.  At 7:45 we will have a Moth Party where John and others will have moth sheets set up with special lighting to attract moths.  We will learn about the different species we find and talk about their role in nature. 

On Saturday (10/12) John will give a talk delving deeper into the Discover Life phenomenon.  He will also lead a walk explaining how to get photographs that can be used at Discover Life.  The talk/walk begins at the Lodge at 10:00 am.  Be sure to check out the Discover Life website at http://www.discoverlife.org/

The following is a brief bio on John.

John Pickering is founder and director of Discover Life (www.discoverlife.org) and on the faculty at the Odum School of Ecology at University of Georgia. His goal is to understand changes in the diversity, abundance, distribution and dispersal of all living things across local to global scales. Clearly, he cannot accomplish this alone. Hence, the advent of Discover Life (www.discoverlife.org) — a website with the technology to enable an army of scientists, students and volunteers to work together, study biodiversity and share information on a grand scale. For over a decade his almost single-minded passion has been to build this interactive encyclopedia.

He is broadly trained as a biologist. He specializes in the natural history of the Hymenoptera (ants, bees, wasps, and sawflies), the epidemiology and virulence of infections, and sex ratio theory. In addition to natural history research, he has worked in public health and agriculture. His field methods include comparative inventories across tropical and temperate sites and long-term monitoring of populations and communities in response to environmental and experimental changes. His current focus is “Mothing” (see http://www.discoverlife.org/moth ) Pickering and his lab photograph moths at lights before dawn every night to document how communities change seasonally and across years in response to changes in temperature, air quality and other variables.

So come Discover Life at Steele Creek Park during Wildlife Weekend and find out how you can get involved.  Call the Nature Center for more information at (423) 989-5616.

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