The Nature Center, with its’ canyons, springs, grasslands, and rocky hills is a biologically diverse area. To help you know what to look for, or identify what you’ve seen, we’ve put together a collection of digital checklists and field guides. These lists are of plants and animals seen at the Nature Center, but they’re also useful guides as you explore the region.

Field Guides

You’ll find two types of digital field guides: a visual guide to butterflies and a dichotomous key to wasps.  Both are heavily illustrated, but work in slightly different ways. To use the butterfly guide, find the butterfly that most closely resembles the one you’re trying to identify and keep working through the guide until you identify your species.

The wasp guide is a dichotamous key. You’ll work through a series of couplets, choosing one of the two statements that most closely resembles the wasp you’re trying to identify. Each couplet is also illustrated, so you can use the key as a visual guide if you prefer.

Checklists

The checklists are simply a list of the species reported to have been seen at the Nature Center. We prefer to think of them as “infant field guides.”  As we have time, we’ll convert the checklists to illustrated field guides.

During your visit to the Nature Center, be on the lookout for things not on our lists and let us know what you’ve seen. We depend on you to help us keep our checklists up to date!