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Eastern Indonesia: The Red and Wilson’s Birds of Paradise
My primary reason for heading to eastern Indonesia was to have the opportunity to view species in the family Paradisaeidae – i.e, the Birds of Paradise. These birds have always had a near-mythical status to me. I have studied and admired them from books and videos but actually seeing one has long seemed out of…
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Eastern Indonesia: Sulawesi Part I
It’s been a couple of weeks since I returned from my latest adventure: a trip to eastern Indonesia. Specifically, it covered the islands of Sulawesi, Halmahera, New Guinea, and Waigeo. What made me want to visit that area of the world in particular? The bird life is one of the big reasons, particularly the Birds…
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Namibia: Kavango and Zambezi Regions (featuring hippos, bee-eaters, and strangler figs).
After the visit to Etosha National Park, we headed through the Kavango and Zambezi regions of Namibia, which are located in the northeastern part of the country. This region of Namibia is much greener and more densely populated than the south, in part due to the presence of two major permanent rivers: the Kavango and…
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Birding in Etosha National Park (Namibia Trip)
Etosha National Park in Namibia is famous for its astonishing diversity of large mammals, but it is also home to an impressive variety of birds, from tiny finches to giant ostriches. Many of these birds are easy to find and photograph because of the abundance of open country in the park. Bustards (family Otididae), including…
Peace Country Naturalist
Hello, and welcome to my blog and website! I am Jessie and I am a biology instructor at Northwestern Polytechnic (formerly Grande Prairie Regional College) in northern Alberta, Canada. I teach university-transfer courses, including introductory courses in biology and second-year courses in evolutionary biology, botany, and animal physiology.
The blog associated with this site will feature posts on natural history (especially of Alberta and British Columbia, but also of other places I may travel to), ecology, hiking, evolution, dogs, and exotic pets. I often place trail cameras out in the bush to captures images of wildlife, and many posts will feature those pictures. I also use autonomous recording units to monitor vocal bird species and will post about those projects in the future as well.
I will also sometimes post items I have written for the students I teach, if I think they will be of general interest.
The latest blog posts are linked to below:
Peace Country Naturalist 