Fundraiser Gratitude

Thanks to the generosity of our Creature Conserve community, we once again exceeded our year-end fundraising goal by several thousand dollars!

In December, we set out to raise $15,000 to support our programs in 2026. We received 43 donations and raised $19,391. These funds will go toward supporting our mission to bring artists, writers, and other creatives together with scientists to cultivate new pathways for wildlife conservation.

On behalf of everyone on our Creature Conserve Team, THANK YOU.

Lucy Spelman - Founder and Executive Director

Mushroom Musings

While the Northern Hemisphere experiences winter, the dry season has finally taken over Panama, my home country. At sunset in my local park, Parque Omar, everything glimmers golden, and the breeze carries away the pink and yellow Tabebuia flowers. It’s the closest thing the tropics have to spring.

I look at the ground, hoping for mushrooms, even though I know it is an unlikely sight. My muse, a mushroom of the genus Pisolithus that grows by the non-native pine trees, has been missing since the December rains. I use its pigment to make ink for my paintings. When asked if I sell the ink, I feel like the bourgeois white men who once played golf in the park.

In other parts of the world, mushroom foraging is highly regulated, as Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing points out in “The Mushroom At The End of the World.” Here in Panama, the law has not yet caught up to fungal enthusiasts in urban public spaces. Since Parque Omar isn’t protected land and its administration is not aware that mushrooms exist, I find myself in a legal loophole. And so, I am left to figure out how much foraging is too much. 

Ana Sofía Camarga - Mentorship Fellow

Open Call: Wildlife Spotlight Series

Our Wildlife Spotlight series invites creatives to share what makes a creature special—and how it interacts with us and our shared environment.

• “Words About Wildlife” celebrates the writer, story, and the animal through short-form fiction, nonfiction, and prose. [300 words; one image with caption]

• “Wildlife Illustrated” celebrates wildlife ecology and zoology as inspiration for illustrators. [Three illustrations with captions, one artist statement]

• “Wildlife In The Field” is a series of short documentary-style nature films featuring animals, their habitats, and conservation stories. [Ten minutes with voice over and subtitles]

• “Wildlife Through The Lens” celebrates the photographer, image, and animal captured at a moment in time. [Three photographs with captions, artist statement]

We encourage everyone in our Creature Conserve creative community to participate by submitting your work and by sharing these posts with friends and colleagues. Please visit this link on our website to download the PDF with full submission details.

Have a creature in mind? Our Creative Consultant, Deanne Fernandes, curates Wildlife Spotlights. Send us your idea via DM to @creatureconserve or write to deanne@creatureconserve.com

Community Highlights

Tanisha Negi is one of our 2025-26 Creature Conserve Scholarship Project recipients. Her project, “Still Singing,” is part of Project Tenfa; in collaboration with @zed.tells. In her words:

This series features birds, especially pheasants, which are an important part of the mountain ecosystem and central to many of the stories I have been exploring. In featuring them, I focus on their place in the landscape and the shifting role they play in how communities understand, honour, and live alongside the natural world. By blending sound, visual storytelling, and traditional knowledge, the project creates a bridge between art and science, offering an intimate, place-based way to engage with wildlife conservation. It invites viewers to see birds, ecosystems, and landscapes not only as data or species, but as part of living cultural memory. “Still Singing” honours the birds who still return, the women who still remember, and the natural world around us that may seem silent but is never still.

Eunhyung Chung @eunhyungchung03 is one of our four 2025-26 Creature Conserve Curatorial Fellows. An artist based in Seoul, South Korea, Sun is drawn more to what is transient and ever-changing than what is fixed and permanent. Reflecting on what has been lost, what exists, and what may vanish, she continually explores the sense of loss in her work. She envisions alternative futures where fragility and resilience coexist.

For her fellowship, Eun is curating “Home Still Home,“ an exhibition that reconnects Korea’s fragmented and precarious aquatic habitats through an artistic act of “stitching,” a gesture of repair that binds what has been torn apart. The exhibition brings “invisible” aquatic beings and the threatened wetlands they depend on into the heart of the city. It features the work of Hyerin Kim kimhyerin.kr/works, Yujin Lee yujinleefactory.myportfolio.com/, Jaehyuk Lee @platypupu_paperart, Eunhyung Chung @eunhyungchung03. “Home Still Home” will be on view from March 15 - 28, 2026, at Osisun gallery @osisun.ch in Seoul, South Korea.

Events & Workshops

CREATURE CONSERVE MAKE-ALONG at Stitch Source

WHAT: Knit, sew, embroider, or crochet anything that relates to nature and wildlife. Help us launch the Creature Conserve Make-Along with a presentation by Dr. Lucy Spelman about the mission of the Barrington, RI-based non-profit, and how we can all make a difference for wildlife conservation. Participants will be eligible to win a Stitch Source Gift Card and to return for community stitching sessions.

WHEN: February 21, 11 AM EST - Kick-off Event with Dr Lucy Spelman Saturdays in March, 10:30 AM - 12 PM EST - Community Stitching Sessions

WHERE: Stitch Source Classroom, 10 Anoka Ave, Barrington, RI, 02806 USA

REGISTER: Register at this link.

100% of your registration fee will be donated to Creature Conserve

Our Book: Creature Needs

Anything You Want To Share?

We would love to hear from you. You can reach us via email at the following:
connect@creatureconserve.com
media@creatureconserve.com

This newsletter is sent from the land of the First Peoples of Northeastern North America, including the Narragansett Nation.