Tag: wildflowers

Bioblitz: Bugs and Birds in Your Backyard

  • A fish sample from this summer's BioBlitz in Ohio. (Photo courtesy of the Geauga Park District)

Hundreds of tiny plants and animals live in our city parks. But most people are too busy enjoying themselves to bother thinking about the critters… let alone to get down on their hands and knees and look for them. Now a campaign is underway to get people to take a closer look at what’s living in their neighborhood parks. The effort is called a “BioBlitz.” It pairs volunteers with scientists. They go into natural areas and see how many different species they can identify. The idea is to show the important role city parks can play in preserving diverse wildlife. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Patty Murray attended a BioBlitz and has this report:

Transcript

Hundreds of tiny plants and animals live in our city parks. But most
people are too busy enjoying themselves to bother thinking about the
critters… let alone to get down on their hands and knees and look for
them. Now a campaign is underway to get people to take a closer look at
what’s living in their neighborhood parks. The effort is called
a”BioBlitz.” It pairs volunteers with scientists. They go into natural
areas and see how many different species they can identify. The idea
is to show the important role city parks can play in preserving diverse
wildlife. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Patty Murray attended a
BioBlitz and has this report:


A small crowd of people is gathered around a table at a picnic shelter.
They’re not reaching for the mustard. Instead they’re watching Bob
Howe open a metal, shoe box-shaped trap… to see what comes out.


“Yeah, there he is, a masked shrew.” “Wow.”


Howe is a Professor of Applied Science at the University of Wisconsin,
Green Bay. He’s at Baird Creek Park… dumping the little, brown
masked shrew into a clear plastic display cage. It darts under a pile
of grass, probably wondering what the heck’s going on.


“There he is wow, he’s tiny.” ‘What is he?’
“He’s called a masked shrew. Sorex cinereus. It’s our smallest mammal in
Wisconsin. A very common species though most people never see them.”


The shrews are apparently rarely seen because they’re so small… not
even half the size of a toy rubber mouse you’d give your cat to play
with.


It’s obscure animals like this that the BioBlitz is all about.
Organizer Tammy Lee is with the group Great Lakes Forever. She wants
people to take time out from barbecuing… and think about the other
beings that share the park with them.


“And just to make them say, ‘Wow, I didn’t know that yellow billed
cuckoo exists here or that salamander.'”


Lee says BioBlitzes are deliberately staged in urban or suburban parks –
not wildlife sanctuaries -to drive home the point that wildlife doesn’t
always
stay within the boundaries of a preserve. It’s in our own backyards.


“Somewhere that they can walk to, something they can go to, not
necessarily to look for biodiversity, but they might come here to play a
baseball game or play on the playground.”


“Hey do you guys want to help me catch some bugs?”


Volunteer Joan Berkopec is corralling a young brother and sister team.
She
hands the kids cloth nets and leads them beyond the merry go
round and the slide to a patch of waist high wildflowers.


They make a few sweeps with the nets, then sit on the grass to see what
they
came up with.


“Oh Lydia! You have a bunch of stuff in here. You have a
grasshopper.”


“Oh… everything’s getting away!”


The nature hunters lose a few flying insects out of their nets, but in
a matter of minutes they’re able to grab five or ten other funny
looking bugs and put them in sample jars.


They’ll take the bugs back to the Park Shelter where professional
scientists
will identify them. By the end of the 12-hour BioBlitz in the park
they’ll
have identified 571 different species.


Professor Bob Howe, recovered from the excitement of the masked shrew
discovery, thinks this park harbors more than 800 different types of
wildlife depending on the season.


“Well, one species that we suspect is nesting there is Wilson’s fowler, which
is a species found in just a few places in the entire state. We’ve also found
a number of what’re called forest interior bird species like scarlet tanager and wood thrush.
That indicates this forest is intact and quite a good habitat for breeding
birds.”


Not bad for a city park.


Howe says it’s important to have a lot of different species living
together.
Without certain trees, some birds wouldn’t come around. Without the
birds… certain insects would proliferate… and so on. Also, Howe
says city parks filter out all sorts of pollutants such as fertilizers
before they get
into lakes and streams.


More BioBlitzes are going on in Wisconsin this summer. The events have
also
been held in places like Chicago and in New York’s Central Park.


For the
Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Patty Murray.

Related Links

Interview: Feathered Friends Return

It’s no wonder the International Migratory Bird Day is held in the month of May. This is the time when trees leaf out and provide a welcome habitat to birds returning from their southern dwelling spots. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jim Blum ventures beyond the backyard to see who’s back:

Transcript

It’s no wonder the International Migratory Bird Day is held in the month of May. This is the time
when trees in the Great Lakes states leaf out and provide a welcome habitat to birds returning
from their southern dwelling spots. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Jim Blum decided to
venture beyond the backyard to see who’s back:


Blum: Take a stroll into a forest and you may notice that trees have greened out this month.
There are thick canopies overhead that weren’t there just a week or two ago. Naturalist Dan Best
says, that times out very nicely for returning migratory birds.


Best: That’s right. A few warm days and the leaves just explode out of the buds. And we have
full leaf-out already. May is just an amazing month. You still have the wildflowers, lots of
wildflowers. And well, Jim, what do you hear?


Blum: Well, certainly a parade of birds that I didn’t hear a month ago. The nuthatches and the
chickadees are still here, but who’s joined them?


Best: Lots and lots of birds. New arrivals here. We have thrushes and warblers and vireos and
tanagers, flycatchers – a tremendous variety of birds that have come to us from their wintering
areas in Latin America. That is South America, Central America, the Caribbean nations. These
birds have made their way, many of them traveling at night, using amazing means of navigation.
They’re using celestial navigation, that is, using the stars. They’re using perhaps the earth’s
magnetism, sensitivity to polarized light, a variety of different means to make their way
thousands of miles over land and ocean to return here to our forests to nest.


Blum: Why May, why now, why so many?


Best: Well, let’s take a walk over to some of these leaves, and no matter what kind of tree you’re
looking at here, what do you notice on these leaves?


Blum: Well, it seems as if several of them have little chew marks or holes.


Best: That’s right, holes. And no sooner does a leaf out, then the salad bar is served for
hundreds of different kinds of caterpillars, whether they be butterflies or especially moths. Their
hatching of these eggs of these caterpillars is synchronized with this leaf-out.


Blum: So, apparently there are many visitors to this buffet, but who, what, and where?


Best: Well, ok. Let’s listen here. (bird chirps) Hear that over there? That’s a hooded warbler.
(bird chirps again) Yeah, there it goes. Now that one will tend to stay low. Oh, the male might
go up a little higher to sing to announce its territory, but generally it’s gonna forge in this shrub
layer in the lower part of the forest.


Blum: (another bird chirps) Now what was that?


Best: Well, I can hear a nice warble up there. That’s the rose-breasted grosbeak. They all
spend most of their time in the understory – that’s about halfway up in this mature forest we’re in.
And then listening a little higher above us, I can hear that nice hoarse, robin-like song of the
scarlet tanager. And I’m even picking up the cerulian warbler, and a little bit of the hoarser vireo
sound, as well as the yellow-throated vireo, and those birds like to stay high up in the canopy.


Blum: So in order for this forest restaurant, if you will, to accommodate so many different
customers, it needs different stories.


Best: That’s right. These birds are here because of the big insect menu that the forest has to
offer. And they’re not fighting for the same seat at the same table because they’re distributed in
these different levels of the forest.


Blum: So if you’re talking about a canopy, an understory, and a shrub layer, you’re indicating a
mature forest.


Best: That’s right. That’s a characteristic of a mature and old growth forest is it has these defined
layers. This kind of habitat, these large tracts of mature forests are getting harder to come by, as
the large trees are logged out, or even worse, these remaining forest tracts are continually
fragmented into smaller parcels, which are less suitable for this big diversity of forest-nesting
birds.


Blum: Now, Dan, I’ve seen the bird books. These birds are extremely colorful. Any tips on the
best chance of actually seeing them?


Best: Well, bring your binoculars into the forest with you. And don’t charge up to every song
that you hear. Just slow down, take it nice and easy. Look where you hear a song. Watch for that
little movement of leaves. Spot that movement. Raise your binoculars and you’ll eventually see
them. You’ll get to see these different kinds of birds.


Blum: That’s naturalist Dan Best. Some of us live in one story houses and some in high-rise
buildings. It’s a good idea when bird-watching to remember that birds also have their own
preferred level. For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Jim Blum.

Hanging on to Karner Blues

  • Karner Blue butterflies depend on wild lupine for survival. Lupine is the only plant Karner Blue caterpillars will eat. Photo by Ann B. Swengel, courtesy of the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.

Once, a postage-stamp-sized butterfly known as the Karner Blue was found all across the Great Lakes states, from Minnesota to New York. Today its population has declined by 99 percent. The Karner Blue’s last stronghold is in Wisconsin, where an unprecedented state-wide effort is underway to save it. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Mary Losure reports: