A recent study in Ecological Economics found that living in an area with a high diversity of birds is just as important to a person’s happiness as their income. “The happiest Europeans are those who can experience numerous different bird species in their daily life, or who
Happy Halloween week, friends! Today’s edition of #NatureZen is decidedly un-Zen, as we asked you to share your deepest nature-related fears with us. We hope that it’s a light-hearted look at some creatures who are perhaps less conventionally lovable than some of the ones we
A huge THANK YOU to all who donated to our matching-gift campaign for re-opening park facilities! We reached our $5,000 community goal, and International Paper will be generously adding a $10,000 match. We can’t express our appreciation enough for your support during this difficult year! We
We’re excited to announce that you can now bring home a little bit of #NatureZen! As a holiday gift to yourself or a friend, pre-order a set of notecards featuring five of our favorite photos featured in past editions of #NatureZen. For $20, you’ll receive
Hello, Overton Park friends! We’ve got some fun news coming soon on how you can bring a piece of #NatureZen home, so look for that in our next e-mail. For today, we’re focusing on a plant that gets a bad rap. Thistles are a plant
Words and photos by Melissa McMasters I’ll admit it: today’s look at the creatures of the Old Forest is a bit of an image rehab project. When most of us think about wasps, we think about the paper wasps that build their nests on our
Today we welcome a special guest author to #NatureZen. Dr. Ronné Adkins is the Memphis Field Office Regional Director of External Affairs for the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation. He has over fifteen years of experience in public service and the environmental field. Dr. Adkins earned
Hope you’ve enjoyed this week’s beautiful weather by spending some quality time at Overton Park! For today’s #NatureZen, we’ll take a journey with two of the park’s newest residents. Words and photos by Melissa McMasters On July 14, I was taking a masked-up walk through the
Happy National Moth Week, everyone! This week we celebrate the beauty and life cycle of an organism with more than 150,000 species worldwide. Because most moths are nocturnal, there are a vast number of species that we may encounter only rarely. But there are plenty of
Today, we’re thrilled to have a guest edition of #NatureZen by Dr. Sinlan Poo, a Research Scientist at the Memphis Zoo. Dr. Poo is a behavioral ecologist who is broadly interested in parental care, predator-prey interactions, reproductive ecology, and reintroduction biology. Though her research is primarily focused on
