Diario de sambiology

On Saturday, October 10th, we'll have our 'Fall BioBlitz' at Oliver Nature Park! Our spring one was fairly successful (around 400 observations), and hopefully we can have a good turnout for our fall bioblitz too. :)

Bring a camera or smart phone and a sense of exploration!

Water and snacks will be provided.

North Central TX is starting to experience just a little bit of fall weather (in the 80's!), so I'll be outside a bunch more, despite the ragweed blooming like crazy and my nose picking up every morsel of pollen...

I've REALLY been getting into bugs, although my ID's are a bit lacking. If you know bugs, I sure would appreciate any guidance.

One thing that is quite nice is the advanced search option on bugguide... A few people had told me about this before, but I'm just now getting the hang of using it:

http://bugguide.net/adv_search/bgsearch.php

With a family name on the "Taxon ID #," and the state selected as "Texas" (or wherever), several options pop up, and you can scroll through the images pretty quickly. For instance, here are the leafhoppers documented in TX on bugguide:

http://bugguide.net/adv_search/bgsearch.php?user=&taxon=146&description=&location%5B%5D=TX&county=&city_location=&adult=&immature=&male=&female=&representative=

You can narrow down the search by using the filters, but I tend not to -- I just use family (or subfamily, genus, etc...) and do a 'search all.'

This has helped me out with my own observations, but I've been using it for others too. :)

We had a really fun bioblitz today -- 66 participants showed up!

I'll be working on the photographs and submissions this upcoming week, but I'll try to get results up as soon as possible in another journal entry and email all the participants. :)

Meanwhile, if you attended, don't forget to upload the photos! :)

This past weekend, I attended the Texas Master Naturalists state conference in Marble Falls and had a blast! Meet several folks for the first time, and it was great to associate some faces to iNat screen names! :)

@connlindajo @billdodd @dariamckelvey @birdladymilam @doodlebug @cullen and I'm sure several more that I can't think of right now.

I did a little presentation on spatial accuracy of observations and attended a few of Cullen's as well. All in all, I'm even MORE motivated to go out and observe more critters. :)

I took several hundred photos from the surrounding state parks that I'll upload in the next few days too.