LEARN ABOUT CREATURES

In any given city, there are countless events, lectures, walks, demonstrations, classes, and exhibits in a given month. But how do you find them? Here are some tips that should help you connect with the kinds of things you'd like to do.

1) Keep your eyes open.

Have you noticed how local businesses sometimes put posters or flyers up in their windows or on bulletin boards? Take a minute to actually look at them. That's how I recently learned about a food festival in my neighborhood (with delicious results). Likewise, take a moment to look through the stacks of cards and brochures that tend to accumulate near store entrances (especially bookstores) and in community buildings like libraries.

2) Targeted Googling

I was able to find a bunch of cool events for my friend on the other side of the country because I knew what to look for. Pick a topic search word (bird, plant, tree, mushroom, seasonal, native, lichen, geology, weather, winter, spring, garden, nature... to name a few) and then add a verb (walk, talk, lecture, tour, class, guide) and your city's name. Sometimes including the current month or year narrows your search.

So, for example, a search for "bird walk" berkeley 2008 uncovered the following:

Fall Bird Walk
Tour/Open House | October 25 | 9-10:30 a.m. | Botanical Garden (U.C. Berkeley)
Panelist/Discussants: Chris Carmichael, UCBG Associate Director of Horticulture and Collections, UC Botanical Gardens; Dennis Wolff
Sponsor: Botanical Garden
Join us for one the of the most popular programs throughout the year: The Fall Bird Walk. Observe and listen to resident and migrant birds with the experts Chris Carmichael, Associate Director of Horticulture and Collections and master birder Dennis Wolff.
$15, $12 members

This listing appears on the UC Berkeley Events Calendar, so I started poking around and discovered a bunch more interesting events. Mental note: check back to find more events here in the future (see #4)

I also found this on a local newspaper's website:
October 23
The Oakland Bird Club “Birds of Asia” A slide presentation by Jeff Robinson at 7:30 p.m. at Oakland Public Library, Rockridge Branch, 5366 College Ave. 444-0355.
It was part of a larger community events calendar that also included film screenings, lectures, and festivals.

3) Don't neglect the local paper

Daily and weekly newspapers often list nature-y events in their "Community" or "Family" events section in the datebook section. They're often buried in a corner, but once you find them, it's worth taking a look.

4) Remember your favorite sources

Once you've had a few successful searches, bookmark the websites for organizations that seem to have regular events or programs. Then get in the habit of checking these sites once a month. For events in San Francisco, I would regularly check the Native Plant Society, Audubon Society, Library, Randall Museum, SF State, California Academy of Sciences websites (among others) to find out about lectures, classes, and exhibits. Once you know where to look, it takes less than an hour a week (spread over as many days as you'd like) to check in and see what's going on.

5) Sign up for mailing lists

If you don't mind getting even more e-mail, see if your favorite organizations send out notices about upcoming events. If they do, sign up to be on their mailing list. It's one way to have events come to you.

6) When you go to stuff, talk to people

Sometimes other people are the best source of information. I learned about some great bird walks by chatting with people at the local botanical garden's monthly walk.

7) Add events to the calendar at localbiology.org

We're trying to build a calendar of events, but we don't know about everything! So if you see something cool, add it to the calendar!

What we're doing with our calendar

Since most nature related events are listed all over the place, we are collecting reports on these events, and listing events that happen in our local areas. We needed to make these calendars for ourselves, so why not share with everyone?

If you are newer to exploring the natural world, we welcome you to add events to this calendar. We try to list things we will really go to, and then we write reports about what we did and what we learned.

Higher Tech calendars

We started this web project April '08, and we are slowly amassing stories and event reports. Winter '08 we will start formatting the calendars, and adding in some other features to make it easier to input events.

While for this project we emphasize talking about events that we actually attended ourselves, we could still all use a modern calendar of nature-related events and we will be advocating for this in various places.

This is how we're thinking

We want:
* standardized format for events
* complete calendar sorted by location
* and we can give back, human reviews of the data, reviews and documentation (yelp.com like)