Welcome!

[melannen]

Welcome to common_nature!

I am one of your glorious moderators, melannen. Your other glorious moderator is elke_tanzer. We made this community because we wanted a place on Dreamwidth to talk about nature, and we hope other people will find it a nice place to stay, too.

What sort of posts are welcome here? Well, I'm planning to start a series of posts about identifying the weeds and shrubs that are flowering in lawns and roadsides in my area. I'll also probably post book reviews and poems and photographs. elke_tanzer has wonderful posts coming up, too. Ask questions, mention something you saw outside today or something you saw in the press; icon posts, fiction with a focus on nature, how-tos, art - all is good! We're all about celebrating the fact that nature is everywhere and anyone can be a naturalist, no matter who they are or where they live.

In the meantime, let's do introductions! If you'd like, tell us a little bit about how you relate to nature and what you'd like to see this community become. And tell us something about what sort of nature you see around you - where do you look when you want to commune with nature? What climate zone or Biome do you live in? I'll start in the comments.

Comments

[fay_e]

This is a lovely idea for a community. I have only a few years of biology to my name, but I always make an effort to spot plants that I am familiar with anywhere I go. Unfortunately I live in a city area so the kind of plants I see on a daily basis tend to be on the smaller side or planted by city planners.

I'd love to know what other types of nature there are in other parts of the world, and get a little help on the plants in my area, if possible. I'm in the equatorial, fully humid region of Asia (Af) and tropical rainforest.

[melannen]

I am terribly interested in the sort of small plants that grow between the cracks in cities, so hopefully we can all teach each other about them! Even though the climate's not really the same in our areas, the weed plants that grow in people-habitat are sometimes the same plants everywhere that people are. (Which some people think is a depressing sign of loss of biodiversity - which is is - but I find something hopeful and heartwarming about it too. People-habitat is a ecological niche, too.)

I'm really hoping we get people posting from all different parts of the world! The wider the better.

[mllesays]

I just recently saw a puppet show about the rainforest (I work at a puppet theatre, it's pretty cool), and because of it I learned that the Asian rainforests have flying snakes. And that is the most terrifying thing I could imagine. ;)

[fay_e]

Wow! That is really pretty cool. Does your theatre specialise in certain types of puppets or do you guys try your hand at everything? =)

Sadly flying snakes are probably only found in the zoo here - jumping snakes and flying squirrels are more likely to be found in whatever natural habitat that's left. I like snakes but I prefer flying squirrels myself.

[mllesays]

We do everything! This particular show was a combination of hand, rod, and body puppets, done in a style called checkblack (the puppeteers stand behind a curtain of light, wearing all black, so you see the puppet and not the person behind it). The website is here, if you want to see more about it.

The show mentioned flying squirrels as well! I'm with you, I'd much prefer squirrels to snakes.