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 Oceanblue Morning-Glory (Ipomoea indica) - Roadside, Everglades National Park, Florida The Everglades has a surprising number of beautiful wildflowers that receive very little attention from photographers. Most visible is the Morning-Glory family with their big, typically colorful blooms. These beautiful flowers are often seen in disturbed areas where their vines can grow quickly and take advantage of ample sunlight. This means that roadsides are one of the easiest places to find these plants.
 Florida Butterfly Orchid (Encyclia tampensis) - Cypress Dome, Everglades National Park One of my favorite things to do in Everglades National Park is to get off the road, off the trail, and go exploring by wading through the marsh. Last Wednesday morning I headed into a cypress dome that is one of my favorite places in the park. It had been five years since I had been in there and I was interested to see how things had fared.
 From research and previous experience, I know I should be able to find this Willet (Catoptrophorus semipalmatus) on the mudflats of Florida Bay. So you have chosen a location and laid out some specific goals. What’s next? Before you decide to make any specific plans, let’s do some research on the natural history of our subjects. Knowing the haunts and habits of wildlife, the blooming and fruiting seasons of plants, and the local weather patterns will make that planning much easier and smoother, not to mention more effective.
The Turks call it a Çipura. If I were back home on the west coast of Florida, I’d call it a pinfish. Scientists call it a Sparus aurata. Whatever its name, it seems to be curious about me. Not just one, but a whole school is circling my head as I float breathing pure oxygen 20 feet below the surface of the azure Aegean Sea.
 Florida Scrub Jay (Aphelocoma coerulescens) - Oscar Scherer State Park, Venice, Florida As I continue to plan for my upcoming trip to Florida in January and February, I am spending time going back through my files and finding gaps that need filled. The only endemic bird to Florida is the Florida Scrub Jay and I only have a few photos of this cool bird. This species is found in the few remaining patches of scrub in the central portion of the peninsula. I have grown up seeing them in a number of occasions but only photographing them on a handful of occasions. I dedicated some time to photographing one social group at Oscar Scherer State Park a while back and got some great images. Now I plan to return to a few other locations and supplement these photographs with images of the bird’s habitat as well as some video and audio recordings of these incredible birds.
Sound hard to believe? According to a recent journal article published in Current Biology, scientists have shown that some birds are changing migration patterns based on food availability, provided by people through feeders and planted trees, and that can result in the evolution of different wing and shape characteristics as well as breeding isolation.
 Orange-bellied Parrot - With only a few hundred of these parrots left in the wild, how does their presence or absence effect the conservation of biodiversity. Biodiversity is a major buzzword these days, but my guess is that many people don’t grasp all that is rolled into that single word. There are multiple measures of biodiversity and yet there is really only one commonly understood definition, the variety of life in any given area or ecosystem. Yet for scientists, biodiversity can be understood on many levels. For instance, let’s imagine three forests. Each forest has 5000 individual birds flying around. Forest #1 has 100 species of birds, each represented by 50 individuals; Forest #2 has 100 species of birds, 99 of which are represented by 2 individuals and the 100th species represented by 4,802 individuals. Finally Forest #3 has 1 species with 5000 individuals. If we are talking strictly about the variety of life, as stated above, then wouldn’t Forests #1 and #2 have the same biodiversity? If we are talking abundance, well they all have 5,000 individuals. So what exactly is biodiversity and why is it so important to conservation? How can we distinguish between these different forests in a more meaningful way? Let’s dive in and get our hands dirty.
 The Florida Grasshopper Sparrow (Ammodramus savannarum floridanus) could gain additional protection if it was classified as a separate species Last Sunday, I mentioned that taxonomy could directly impact the conservation status of a species. That statement was based on personal observation but today, while browsing the latest issue of Biological Conservation, I found a great article surveying that very topic. W.R. Morrison III and his colleagues surveyed recent taxonomic changes and gauged their impact on the conservation of the associated species.
This week’s Nature has an interesting article about conservation of the Atlantic Forest of Brazil and the charismatic Golden Lion Tamarin. We’ve all seen it before, conservation efforts for a particular area focus on the conservation of a single charismatic species. Whether it’s a tiger, a panda, or a beautiful monkey, the basic approach is to use this single charismatic species to gain the attention of those people in a position to save this species. If you save the species, then those efforts also result in saving other species that live in the same habitat. It is an approach used by nearly every conservation group out there and it works fairly well. But what about when it doesn’t? What do you do then?
 Once considered a distinct species (Melithreptus laetior), the Golden-backed Honeyeater is now lumped with the Black-chinned Honeyeater (Melithreptus gularis) Over the past few weeks I have been able to add several new species to my life list mostly because I have begun to pay extremely close attention to the identification of some difficult birds. Since some of the species I have been looking for are so incredibly difficult to identify, I have begun to wonder about the definition of a species and why do we have this compulsion to classify animals. Modern taxonomy started with Linnaeus in the 18th century and today we continue to expand on his systematic classification of plants and animals. Taxonomy is the process of classifying a species within the context of other related species. Closely related species for example are placed in the same genera while closely related genera are placed in the same family. On and on it goes up through orders, classes, phyla, and eventually kingdoms. Could this desire to classify and place each animal in a defined category be motivated by our attempt to seek order out of chaos? This classification does provide evolutionary context for a species, which can valuable for scientists trying to study any particular species. First, let’s back up a few steps to the very beginning… What is a species?
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