LINK INDEX
Animals
Here are animal links.
Similar in tone to this site, only for birds,
is The
Nest Box, a carefully crafted site of
backyard and field birding, nesting, gardening for birds and
butterflies, travelogues, and photo galleries. Very nicely
done by Arlene Ripley, whose love, i suspect is bluebirds
and for those reasons wages a territorial war against the
invasive 'house sparrow'. She even entertains questions
about anything to do with birds.
The National
Audubon Society has designated the Highlands
Plateau as an IBA (Important Bird Area) and features
Olive-sided Flycatcher, Canada Warbler, Black-throated Blue
Warbler, and others. The area is particularly significant
for Peregrine Falcons, Blackburnian Warblers, Golden-crowned
Kinglets, Red-breasted Nuthatches, Least Flycatchers,
Rose-breasted Grosbeaks, and Brown Creepers, among many
others. The Highlands
Plateau Audibon Society has their own webpage on
this server.
Local Appalachian
Naturalist Alex Netherton suggests a
few places in the Asheville area that are great for birding.
The self-proclaimed Arachnological
Hub of the World Wide Web, is a path to thoughtful and
some tedious spider sites across the web run by the
University of Antwerp, Belgium. They have arachnid
information sorted by Order, which includes the scorpions,
the mites and ticks and whatnot. These are very organized
links. I'm not sure how often the pages are checked, but i
didn't run across any broken links. Includes commercial
links as well as people's homepages and thesis and treatises
on these fascinating creatures. This really does seem to be
a great arachnid resource for browsing and doing reports and
just plain learning. It is personally maintained specialty
sites such as these that i hope, for the future, will make
the internet a real information resource and let Yahoo and
other search engines concentrate on commercial sites on a
'for profit' basis.
Randy Emmitt's great photography site
showcases his love for the 'bugs' of the world. He has other
nature shots, but a complete list of all 94 species
Butterflies
of North Carolina, is not to be missed (He
doesn't have pictures of them all, but MANY of them). He
graciously provides information about them, plus info on
where he took the picture. Sort of like a butterfly version
of what i'm trying to do with the plant id. Obstensibly,
he's out to sell some of his pictures, but he puts them up
on the web and gives you a reason for them. Plus, they are
crystal sharp and load fairly quickly. He also provides tips
on scanning that's both technical and enlightening.
Again, local Appalachian
Naturalist Alex Netherton really digs
snakes and has quite a bit of information on them and will
even identify them for you if you e-mail him! Great pictures
too! Alex's interests doesn't stop at snakes, though, there
is other information here.
