Nature Blog Network

I am positively thrilled, THRILLED to announce that Seabrooke Leckie of The Marvelous in Nature has joined the Nature Blog Network team. No doubt, many of you know Seabrooke through her fantastic blog, her engagement in the nature blogging community, or perhaps her star turn in her January 2009 NBN interview. Today, she is introducing herself and the critical role she’ll be assuming on this site. Please extend your warmest welcome! — Mike

Regular readers of the Nature Blog Network blog will have observed, perhaps with some disappointment or sadness, the departure of longtime team member John, also known as Born Again Bird Watcher. John’s posts on recent nature news and pertinent podcasts were a staple on the NBN blog, and their absence has been noticeable since he stepped down at the end of May.

The remaining members of the team, Mike, N8, and Wren, have been looking for a replacement who would be able to fill John’s shoes as the fourth NBN crewperson. I was flattered to be approached by Mike earlier this week asking whether I would be interested in joining the team. It is a great honour to be thought so highly of by these three people, each fabulous bloggers in their own right, and the hardworking cogs behind the scenes that keep NBN running so smoothly.

To a few of the NBN blog’s readers I need no introduction, but to the rest of you: Hello! I’m best known within the blogging community for my blog The Marvelous in Nature, which I’ve been writing for about a year and a half now. The blog’s name comes from a quote by Aristotle: “In all things of nature there is something of the marvelous.” This has been my philosophy from the start with the blog, attempting to highlight a little bit about the interesting things I happen across. I’ve found that quite often there is more to the story than you might initially think.

Among my other online appearances, I maintain a moth blog (a little more sporadically than my primary blog), and also recently started up the blog carnival The Moth and Me, in an effort to try to celebrate and highlight these fabulous but often overlooked creatures of the night (and sometimes day). (PS – the deadline for submissions for the June edition is this weekend, and I’d love to receive your post! It could be as simple as flipping on the porch light tonight and photographing what comes in.) I’m interested in pretty much everything out in nature, but if you haven’t guessed, I have a soft spot for birds and moths.

On a personal level, I am self-employed as a freelance writer and illustrator, eschewing the security of a traditional 9-to-5 job to do something that appeals to me on a much deeper level. My primary project currently is a field guide to the moths of northeastern North America, which I’m co-authoring with my friend bird illustrator and moth guru David Beadle. The book will be part of the Peterson Field Guide series and should find its way to store shelves in spring 2012. But first we need to actually finish piecing it all together!

Home for me is eastern Ontario, Canada. My longtime boyfriend and I live with our two cats and a dog in a rural home on the Frontenac Axis, a southern extension of the rugged Canadian Shield that joins the boreal region of Canada to the Adirondacks in New York. The region is a unique juxtaposition of the boreal forests of the north and the Carolinian forests of the south. Because of this, the biodiversity in this region is incredible – the highest of anywhere in Canada, with many rare and provincially Threatened or Endangered species – and I never lack for something to talk about on my blog. Although we currently rent, we hope to purchase our own little piece of heaven here on the Axis in the next few years, and build a permanent home of our own.

I joined the Nature Blog Network in its first week or two of existence. It was still in its infancy, and when I signed up, my blog, at the bottom of the list, was #56. That was in January of 2008, not all that long after the inception of my own blog. My, how the NBN has grown! The ranking of my blog hasn’t changed too much, but with the toplist now approaching 1000 members, its relative position has skyrocketed. I never imagined, when I started the blog, that it would enjoy such readership, and I’m humbled to know that so many people find my blog worth following.

The NBN has changed a lot, too. Besides just the addition of another 900 blogs to the list (nine hundred! It’s stunning to think that there are so many other people out there with similar passions, writing and sharing them with the rest of the world), the NBN has grown to include a blog of its own. But more than that, it’s grown into a community, a meeting place where all the best of nature blogging comes to hang out. Complete strangers get to know each other through their blogs, and when they finally have the opportunity to meet each other, as occasionally happens at organized events like the recent New River Birding and Nature Festival in West Virginia, or simply through planned travel, it’s like meeting a longtime friend who you haven’t seen in a while. It’s hard to overestimate how much of blogging is for the connections one makes to others.

My role here with the NBN will be as the Community Bulletin Board coordinator. On a weekly basis I’ll be posting the latest news from community members to our virtual “bulletin board”, summarizing the current events and announcements of the past and future weeks. This will be a place to advertise a contest you might be running on your blog, a community (real-world) event or festival that might appeal to fellow bloggers, wanted or for sale ads that are especially pertinent to nature bloggers, self-promotional items for things like artwork or nature books published by our NBN members, and anything else that might seem appropriate. Think of it as like the bulletin board hanging in the entrance of your local grocery store, but with a decidedly nature-themed bent.

If you have something that you think should be posted to the weekly board, send me an email (sanderling AT symbiotic DOT ca) with the announcement or news item. Make sure you put “NBN Bulletin Board” in the subject line so it doesn’t get lost in my inbox! I will review the item to make sure it’s appropriate, and then include it in that week’s post if it is. Anyone can submit news, there’s only one criteria – the announcement must be submitted by an NBN member. That’s not to say that the event necessarily be run or the item belong to the NBN member, simply that the submission must come from an NBN member – this is the NBN community news, after all. When you send me your news item, include the name/url of your blog in your email.

I’m excited to be joining the NBN blog team, and am looking forward to hearing from our membership with their community news, so get started sending them in!