NEBRASKAland Magazine is dedicated to outstanding photography and informative writing with an engaging mix of articles and photos highlighting Nebraska’s outdoor activities, parklands, wildlife, history and people.
Issue link: http://mag.outdoornebraska.gov/i/977334
F or at least a few minutes, a surprised prairie rattlesnake was a minor celebrity. A circle of onlookers stared intently at it, snapping cell phone pictures, as herpetologist Dan Fogell quickly plopped a baseball cap onto the hissing reptile. "So he's going to get comfortable," Fogell said, explaining for the crowd that snakes prefer to lay covered with something touching their backs. Thirty seconds later, he asked the crowd if they were ready for him to take the hat off, and received a chorus of enthusiastic yeses. This wasn't just a wildlife viewing opportunity; this snake, as well as 105 other species observed that day, was recorded by its admirers for science. The event was a bioblitz, an event that has become popular throughout the world and is taking off in Nebraska. During a bioblitz, natural history specialists and, often, members of the public, set out in a specific area with one goal: to find and identify as many species of living things as possible during a short period of time, usually 24 hours. "It's like a biologist's party," said Sam Droege. Droege works for the U.S. Geological Survey, and together with colleague Dan Roddy invented the idea of the bioblitz in 1996. Their aim was to help staff of a small urban park in Washington D.C. learn about the wildlife that inhabited it. It was an idea born out of necessity: the park didn't have the funds to pay for specialists to do a survey. So Droege and Roddy concocted an event that would lure specialists out on their own time, coaxing them out of their offices with the promise of unfettered exploration. "Everyone gets to do what they loved when they started out learning about biology, which is to go out in the field and find stuff," he said. "They're not constrained by following a prescribed protocol." Bioblitzes aren't just fun for the professionals. Go to one, and you'll see kids happily tromping through weeds and muck to find creeping and crawling things, and adults whose eyes shine like a child's as they study new discoveries. It goes back to the idea of exploration, said environmental educator Deborah Anderson, who helped organize a statewide series of Nebraska bioblitzes in 2016. "We think of an explorer as somebody who's going into uncharted territory, and that's not true. You can explore your own surroundings. The biodiversity that's in Nebraska is amazing, and I don't think that everybody is aware of that." Nebraska's biodiversity was on full display at Wildcat Hills State Recreation Area's first bioblitz last July. Over the course of one Friday night and Saturday morning, volunteers identified about 140 species living in the area's rocky landscape, including roughly 40 species of birds; 65 plant species, with more than 40 species of blooming wildflowers; and 30 species of invertebrates (insects and spiders). Among their findings were two bighorn sheep, four little brown bats, two American kestrels, a jumping spider and an errant six-lined racerunner that made its way into the nature center just as the event started. The event was structured, as many bioblitzes are, into a series of sessions led by natural history specialists, which participants can pick and choose to All Creatures Great and Small By Renae Blum Participants in Indian Cave State Park's first bioblitz in 2017 went on walks with biologists to help identify as many species of living things in the park as possible. PHOTO BY RENAE BLUM 36 NEBRASKAland • MAY 2018 PHOTO BY JUSTIN HAAG