Nature Blog Network

I’m not as young as I used to be.  Who is, right?  But as far as those with a real interest in nature and birding, I’m still, at nearly 30, closer to the bottom end of the bell curve for this particular hobby.  There just aren’t many kid naturalists out there, and those that are out there tend to be few and far between.  Now when you throw blogging into the mix, the mean age lowers a fair bit.  Not least because the technology is becoming practically second hand for an entire generation of naturalists, where before it was solely the realm of the technophile.  And as such, there’s a real opportunity to use the community we have here to incubate the interests of young people in nature, be it birds, bugs, plants, or whatever.  After all, one of the mmost enjoyable things about being in a community is seeing it thrive beyond our own little imprint.

So what does that mean for us?  Not only to encourage young naturalists in general, but those that chose to become a member of our online community, the young nature bloggers.  And fortunately we have a few within our ranks that I’m sure those of you interested in encouraging a love not only of nature, but of writing about nature, will want to know about.

Yeah I know, the photo’s kind of dated.  But there just aren’t that many freely available photos of young people birding…

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- You can usually find Young Naturalist J at The Ovenbird, but he also is a member of the team that blogs at birdQUIZ too.  He’s been banding for half his life, and has got some interesting stories to tell.

- Helena of Adventures of Bird Girl runs the gauntlet between the twin obligations of the schooling and the blogging, the delicate balance many young naturalists, not to mention those who write about it too, have to maintain.  Under the circumstances she can be forgiven for choosing school, but it’s fun when she does write.

- A spin-off of popular birding blog and NBN member Birdfreak, Dakota’s All Natural Experience is the journal of a young birder in Northern Illinois as he learns about photography and enjoys birds and bugs.  If you’re a fan of Birdfreak you likely already know about Dakota, but if not, it’s well worth checking out.

- UPDATE: Amphidrome was brought to my attention.  I’ve mentioned it before in conjunction with other marine and invertebrate blogs but never realized that genghisprawn was a high school student.  That certainly says something as to the quality of the content here.

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Young bloggers are great, but here are also some other NBN sites that are specifically aimed at getting younger kids into nature, with the hope, I suspect, that they’ll start blogs that eventually sign up for the NBN too.  Lots of useful tips and interesting activities can be found at the following.

- The Trailmix.Net Blog focuses mainly on hiking and backpacking with kids.

- Nature’s Call is written fromm the perspective of an environmental educator.

- And Mama Joules’ has lots of interesting commentary on Science education for elementary age kids.

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So hopefully, if you’re successful with the second part first, you’ll get the first part second, great nature blogs from young bloggers and naturalists.

Give them some attention and encouragement!

If you are a teenage nature blogger in the NBN network, or you know of one I missed, please let me know.  I’d love to correct my mistake.

photo from pcopros vis flickr