Samantha Alda

Positive Mindset ✌♥️ Art 📓🎤🎨Wildlife Biology Conservation🌲🐦🐾🦋

[Earth @earthcurated]

"Spending just 20 minutes near the ocean has been scientifically proven to significantly lower cortisol levels. Nature really is the ultimate therapy."

[Samantha Alda @mantha325]

@TinkerCunt_ @emilyfpoitras 😆

[Earth-ed @Animalww26]

Most people don’t realize how powerful touching a tree while barefoot can be (it can change your life in just 15 minutes) 🌳

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Canada built bridges for bears, and the bears used them.

So did wolves, cougars, elk, moose, lynx, wolverines, bighorn sheep, black bears, deer, and almost everything else trying to cross one of the busiest highways in the Rockies.

The Trans-Canada Highway cuts through Banff National Park for 82 km. For decades, it did what highways do: split habitat in half, severed migration routes, isolated populations, and turned animal movement into roadkill.

So Parks Canada tried something that sounded ridiculous to a lot of people at the time: they built wildlife bridges and tunnels.

They look nice, but they're far from a decoration. Forested overpasses wide enough for grizzlies and elk. Dark underpasses for cougars and black bears. Fencing along the highway to keep animals off the pavement and guide them toward safe crossings.

At the time, critics called it a waste of money and editorials opined that animals would never use them.

Fortunately, animals don't read opinion pieces. Since monitoring began, wildlife have used Banff’s crossings more than 250,000 documented times.

Grizzlies took years to trust them. Elk started testing them while they were still under construction. Different species chose different designs: grizzlies and elk tended to prefer wide, open overpasses, while cougars and black bears often used narrower underpasses.

The results were not subtle. Wildlife-vehicle collisions dropped by more than 80% overall. For elk and deer, they dropped by more than 96%.

Banff now has one of the most studied wildlife crossing systems on Earth, and countries around the world have looked to it as a model.

[PmAmTraveller @pmamtraveller]

"Predator" by Michael de Adder

[Hello Kitty @hellokitty]

#WellnessWednesday: Tag a bestie who could use this reminder today 💖

[US Department of the Interior @Interior]

🎶 Wastin' away again in Pollinatorville... 🎶 Sing it, Jimmy.

This National Pollinator Week, we're celebrating all pollinators, including the lesser long-nosed bat.

No, this bat isn't normally yellow. It's covered in pollen after visiting a blooming agave. As it travels from flower to flower, it helps pollinate desert plants, support healthy ecosystems, and yes, it helps make tequila possible.

Shout out to the bees, butterflies, birds, beetles, moths, flies, and bats that take us to Margaritaville.

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Nobody wants a city on Mars. Nobody wants AI in every app. Nobody wants a robot butler. Nobody wants data centers everywhere. Nobody wants flying cars or humanoid robots. We want clean water, we want bees to survive, and we want a habitable planet.

[‏ً @omgsidewalks]

SERIOUS QUESTION: Does anyone else get sad and confused when trees get chopped down in residential areas that literally aren’t even bothering anyone ??

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

The skunk waddling across your yard at night is a pacifist who really just wants to eat your pests.

Skunks are grub specialists. They go for the larvae of Japanese beetles and June beetles, the same grubs that kill grass from the roots up, and they'll dig up a yellowjacket nest and eat the whole thing too. Those little cone-shaped holes in your lawn aren't vandalism. They're a skunk telling you that you had a grub problem, and that it's handling it.

And the spray? It's a last resort, and they really don't want to use it. A skunk is slow, near-sighted, and mild-mannered, and before it ever sprays it will warn you over and over: stomping its front feet, hissing, arching its back, lifting its tail, even making little fake charges. It's an animal begging you to just back away.

So if you see one trundling through your yard at dusk, you don't have a problem, you have a slow, gentle, near-blind exterminator doing a lap of your yard. Give it space and let it work.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Bees aren’t the only pollinators keeping plants alive.

[✏️ Hashem Al-Ghaili]

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

Being part of a generation that was told “Wikipedia is not a source” makes it genuinely baffling to me that jobs are now telling people to just use ChatGPT for everything.

[Give A Shit About Nature @giveashitnature]

Most butterfly gardens are built to feed butterflies. The good ones are designed to make more butterflies.

A yard full of nectar flowers is a snack bar for the adults, and that's a fine thing to offer. But flowers alone make a rest stop, not a home. A few other pieces turn it into the real thing.

The big one is host plants. Caterpillars don't drink nectar, and most won't eat just any leaf. Monarch caterpillars need milkweed; black swallowtails want dill, parsley, or fennel. Without the specific plant a species lays its eggs on, your garden raises no butterflies of its own.

Then the small stuff. A flat rock or two in full sun gives them somewhere to bask, since a butterfly can't fly until the sun has warmed its wings. A shallow dish of wet sand lets them "puddle," pulling up the salts and minerals nectar doesn't provide. A wind-sheltered corner, with a few stems and leaves left standing through winter, gives them places to rest and overwinter.

And no spray, not even the organic kind, since most of it kills caterpillars just as readily as the pests.

This is how your butterfly garden stops being a place they pass through and starts being a place they come from.

[Tiny Buddha @tinybuddha]

Let some things wait. The purchase. The dishes. The return text. It’s amazing how much lighter life feels when you stop treating everything as urgent.

[femiiiiii. @femiiiszn]

i hope the next global trend will be empathy and critical thinking.

[Scott @Havenlust]

“If you truly love nature, you will find beauty everywhere.”

— Vincent van Gogh

[Tiny Buddha @tinybuddha]

Try to be kind to yourself when your emotions make you question whether you actually deserve kindness.

[Natural History Museum @NHM_London]

Overfishing doesn’t just reduce cod populations, it can change the fish themselves. 🐟

Find out how cod have evolved – and why sustainable fishing is so important – in this week’s #SurprisingScience.