Although all the suggestions are important, it’s only human to have some favorites. My favorites included having field trips to learn about wildlife. Putting a plastic bottle filled with water and rocks in your toilet tank to achieve water conservation for each flush gets top points for being creative.

From planting shade trees to cool a house in summertime, to planting trees, to having indoor plants to make the air better, people voted for the plant kingdom.

Overall, the ideas are good and if you’re looking for something new to do you’re likely to find an activity in the comments.

Somewhere along their route in trying to save butterflies, they remembered that fun is often a first step to education. They have 10 games on their website, all about butterflies.

The Adonis Blue (this butterfly’s males have brilliant blue wings) Blue Puzzle is a jigsaw puzzle in which you drag and drop the pieces. What’s That Caterpillar is one of the matching games on the website. The Butterfly Caterpillar Foodplants game introduces some landscapes and shows where butterflies want to lay their eggs. If you want to test your butterfly knowledge, check out the Butterfly and Moth Identification Quiz. Or choose some of the 6 other games on the website.

If you’d like to learn more about butterflies, explore the rest of Butterfly Conservation’s website. Butterflies are gorgeous and we need to work together to save them.

If you like puzzles, the Foundation’s website has a South American animals word search with wildlife ranging from ants to jaguars. The Bird Game is more for kids than adults, but is creative and thus worth playing. They also have colouring sheets and a dot to dot Parrot.

Also on the Foundation’s website are fun animal fact sheets for a dozen mostly exotic animals, and three ecosystems. They’re a good introduction to their topics. They include information such as there are over 250 species of poison dart frogs living in the rainforests of Central and South America. And Macaques would sure love an all you can eat buffet – in the wild they have been recorded as eating more than 120 different types of plants as well as insects, mice and nestling birds.

Having grown up reading about Gerald Durrell’s adventures as he travelled the world and worked in wildlife conservation, I’m happy to know that the Foundation has educational entertainment value that will help to attract people to their more serious messages.

For conservation reasons, they recommend a 5 minute shower. For drinking, keep a pitcher of water in your fridge – it makes it easy to get cool water without running the tap. A friend of mine has a filter pitcher which removes the impurities from the tap water, then keeps the clean water cool in the fridge.

If you want to play a game, Savewater.com.au has a free online game that is possibly the most creative game out there. Called the Mission H20 Game, the fun begins with an introduction of the main characters in a great short film. Then you access a house and garden and do various activities, such as plugging holes in a garden hose or answering questions about water use.

It’s a fun game and if you happen to be an Australian resident, you may also be interested in learning that the water conservation game has a contest that lets you enter a draw for one of five iPod Shuffles. Even if you’re elsewhere in the world and thus not eligible to enter the contest, it’s still a fun game.

There are lots of stocking stuffers and goods available for sale on the websites of wildlife conservation and humanitarian groups.  Remembering to buy from them at this time of year not only feels good but also helps our world.  If you’re too late for Christmas, then consider a New Year’s present.

Their 7 online free games are quite sophisticated and fun. After finding out I’m like a fox because I enjoy buffets and can eat almost anything, I went on the RWS Expedition. It’s a fun combination of a maze game and wildlife information.

The Arctic Ice Game is a charming little time waster as you try to get the little Arctic person across the ice flow while avoiding the moving hazards. Skid’s another delight, as you try to guide the squirrel through the logs while avoiding the forest’s hazards.

It’s a Green Life lets you honestly assess how environmentally friendly your lifestyle is when it comes to how you live at home and what food you buy. Just be sure to remember you’re in the UK in the game – if driving on the right side of your car doesn’t remind you, being told to buy UK apples probably will.

Matching baby animals to their adult versions, and building your own beast, round out the games.

If you’d like to add animal screensavers or wallpaper to your computer, check out the BBC’s collection.

Further to my article on December 9 about Artists for Conservation, their Founder Jeff Whiting will be on Fanny Kiefer’s Studio 4 (Vancouver TV show) tomorrow.  He will be speaking about the mountain gorilla project I wrote about.

Cheers,

Alison

This being the Friday File, let’s also point out that they have some fun free games on their website. 

Many of the games are classics. If you like to start your day doing a crossword, Big Cat Rescue offers you a crossword that’s centered around Christmas. There’s also a Word Search game in which you find big cat species names, such as Cheetah and Leopard.

As you’ll see when you visit their games page, Big Cat Rescue offers enough games to keep someone happily busy during slower days over the holiday season, or anytime.

Also, the organization has a lot of Free Stuff online, including screensavers, coloring pages, and even calendars. Enjoy!

The expedition wants to find the exact location that inspired Akeley’s famous diorama of the mountain gorilla, and then paint what the site looks like today. The expedition is being sponsored in part by Vancouver-based Artists for Conservation and the American Museum of Natural History 50 where the original painting is on display.

Akeley’s efforts were key in conserving the mountain gorilla’s area as Africa’s first national park nearly a century ago. Today there are only around 740 mountain gorillas left, and Artists for Conservation are joining the campaign to save them.

This artistic project is one of Artists for Conservation’s annual flag expeditions, which aim to combine modern day science with art to raise awareness for critical conservation work. As the group suggests, they believe in art in action.

If you’d like to follow along with the flag expeditions, Artists for Conservation have ongoing updates on their website.

The Jungle Bridge game  is also fun. You get to play at being a wildlife conservation manager who needs to move endangered animals into a wildlife reserve. Be careful about what you choose to load into your truck, because you don’t want to make the truck heavier than what the bridge can hold.

If you like trivia, there’s a Wildlife and Water game that tests your knowledge about how much water San Diego Zoo animals use.

If you want to play more games, the San Diego Zoo has a great collection of them on their website.