Diario del proyecto San Mateo County Bio-Blitz

Archivos de Diario para diciembre 2018

viernes, 14 de diciembre de 2018

Tidbits Galore to Fill Your Stockings...or your insect nets, or your bird nests...

So, dear San Mateo County participants - Our bioblitz projects in conjunction with California Academy of Sciences, Sequoia Audubon Society, and San Mateo County Parks, have now been combined into an automatic conglomerating project. No need to join, but it makes for an interesting visit to see what we have achieved through our dedicated efforts to chronicle life in our small slice of the planet. https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/san-mateo-county-parks-bioblitzes

With the recent rains, our county has turned into a fungal paradise. We need the good fungi IDers to take a look at the sightings of the past week - @damontighe , @leslie_flint , @alan_rockefeller - and anyone else you can think of, please tag them in the comments section.

It is also fun to look at the map of sightings, and zoom in to see where sightings are at their densest. Gazos Creek Road, for instance, is rich with sightings. Everywhere we've blitzed is likewise rich with sightings. We keep turning up new areas due to intrepid exploration and avid iNat-ters whose knowledge of a wide range of taxa grows constantly. Please feel free to report on new areas you find. Yesterday, I walked the full length of the Old Stage Road trail at Sam McDonald County Park, from Pescadero Road to SR 84. There were quite a few intriguing areas - easy access to Alpine Creek, a large water tank with moist ground around it, a few human dwellings with a handful of introduced plants near to SR84. Who knows what all could be there, especially as the seasons change. With citizen-science, both methods pay dividends - going back to the same sites many times in order to get a longitudinal sense (over time) of what occurs there, and exploring new sites so that we fill out distribution maps in ever greater detail.

Please put our two 2019 bioblitzes on your calendars - March 2 at Sam McDonald (meet in the main parking lot at 8:45) and April 27 at Huddart Park (use the main entrance and follow the signs to the meeting place, 8:45). The latter will be part of the City Nature Challenge weekend. Support the Bay Area as we look to snag back-to-back championships!

Thanks for all you are doing to document life in San Mateo County. At last night's Sequoia Audubon Society general meeting, we had a panel discussion about the history of our Christmas Bird Counts. One of the people who is a goo record keeper, and a participant in CBCs (and therefore citizen-science) since 1969, is also a fine record-keeper. He astounded us all by saying that in the mid-1970s, there were CBCs in this county that had not a single American Crow nor a Common Raven! This is in his lifetime (and he's still in his 60s now), so this is a vivid marker of how much things can change. What we do today, even in our leisure, can tell a story to generations yet to come about the biology of this area. Happy holidays and make a New Year's Resolution to iNat more and more! - @gyrrlfalcon - Jennifer Rycenga

Publicado el viernes, 14 de diciembre de 2018 a las 06:48 PM por gyrrlfalcon gyrrlfalcon | 0 comentarios | Deja un comentario