On a beautiful spring day the East Kootenay NatureKids BC club celebrated Earth Day by participating in a community clean up.
10 NatureKids and their families worked hard to remove trash from their community, supporting the health of the environment. Community clean ups are an easy and great way to give back to your community! This event was hosted by the City of Kimberley and Wildsight.
How can you take part in a community clean up? Try reaching out to your local municipality, naturalist group, or stewardship group. Participating in community clean ups is a great way to build connections with community members and explore local greenspaces.
After the trash was put in its proper place, the kids planted their own pollinator plants to take home!
It’s important to think about the kinds of flowers we put in our community gardens, our parks, and our own backyards. Green space is precious, especially in urban centres, and the flowers we choose can have a big impact on the survival of important native pollinators.
Most plants have flowers for one purpose – to attract a pollinator in the hopes of being fertilized by another flower’s pollen (a process called ‘cross pollination’). Different plants use different strategies to attract pollinators, giving us a wonderful array of flowers with different shapes, smells and colours. Breeding enthusiasts have enhanced petals, size, colour, scent, and number of flowers in order to create hybrids that humans find attractive. However, this is not always beneficial to the wildlife that interact with them. Horticultural flowers sometimes lose their ecological service once they are bred (for example, their pollen can be toxic or unappealing to bees), leaving them with little to offer the pollinators.
Native plants that have co-evolved with our pollinators offer the best source of nutrition at just the right time of year. If you can, choose to plant native flowers from local seed sources (check out https://www.pollinator.org/guides-canada for region specific recommendations).
Are bees the only pollinators in BC? Check out our Pollinator ID Card to learn more.
Experience Explorer Days with your family, learn about nature and receive a free subscription to NatureWild!