Biodiversity Month - Report Event 158

What species was suprising?
Because of the cold weather, we found fewer insects than we had expected. Also, many of the plants were difficult to identify because they didn't have any flowers yet.

What species was the "coolest" and why?
The snake we found was the coolest - because it's not often that we see them. Our backyards are generally not wild enough to see these.

Mrs. Chris Jacobson reports:
Our group was made up of parents & kids from 1st through 6th grade. We had one meeting on a Friday night to get ready for the BioBlitz. There were children from five families taking part, so we made it into a party so the whole family could participate. We talked about how we were going to do the BioBlitz, and we looked over some books that would help us in identifying species. We talked about getting into groups & that we would need to assign someone in each group the task of writing down what we found. It was decided to have each group contain a range of ages (adults plus children from 1st grade through 6th grade). We also talked about some safety measures that we needed to take and the "do's and don'ts", and we reviewed the map of our biodiversity area.

A week later, on Saturday, we met at the park to do the BioBlitz. It was pretty cold (45 degrees), but the sun was shining which warmed us up. We had three groups & each took a recording book & we set the timer for 30 minutes. Before we started we reviewed some of our rules, such as "watch out for the thorns on the hawthorn trees" and "anybody who falls in the creek doesn't get any pizza for lunch". Then we started!

Each team went off in a different direction and each group had at least one parent to go along with them. Some species we knew on sight, others we had to study & some we took digital pictures of, so we could look at them again later. We carried baggies with us to bring home some samples that also couldn't be identified in the field. The 30 minutes passed much more quickly than we expected. When the time was up, we stayed at the park for about another hour, just investigating some more, and looking in our reference books to identify species.

Then we went to one family's house & had a pizza lunch. After that, each team went over their lists & made sure we all knew what each record contained.

The children who participated all seemed to have a good time - as evidenced by their reluctance to leave when the time was up! It was good to have a mix of ages in each group - it made us realize that the younger kids are of value on a team as much as the older kids. Some teams found more plants, some found more mammals & birds. Each team's results were evidence of this.

Just for fun, we also wrote down observations that didn't make it in to the official record. For instance we saw deer tracks (but no deer); we found an empty bee's nest; various animal droppings; some really large ant hills; bark with holes pecked into it; and soft spots where deer may have slept.

If we were to do this event again, I think we'd like to study up a little on identifying species, so we could go faster & probably find more distinct species. This was really a great event for the whole family.

Oak Creek Backyard BioBlitz