Taking a 3 day week end to get away from work, we found ourselves immersed in some work, but it was definitely fun!
Brown County State Park was having its inaugural "bioblitz", a cataloging of all the plants and animals that inhabit the 15,696 acre park.
Volunteers, professional ornithologists, entomologists, herpetologists, botanists, colleges, Scouts, all gathered together for 72 hours of nearly non-stop crawling, netting, scooping, photographing, GPS tagging, and sampling of all manner of living things in the parks borders.
At our time for departure mid sunday, the break down was roughly:
20 different Amphibian species
300 insect species
18 species of mammals
19 species of reptiles
200 different species of flowers, weeds and shrubs
dozens of tree species
17 species of fish
dozens of bird species from the tiny runy throated Hummingbird to the Great Horned Owl, and all manner of birds in between!
This also happenned during the final transition of life for toads, and the woods and trails were covered in thousands of baby toads, that had just finished morphing from tadpoles to toads. The miniature little boogers were no bigger then the diameter of a pencil eraser coming out of every pond, creek and puddle!
I know for a fact next year we will be back for this, and anyone interested in nature should keep their eyes peeled for the date of the next one as well.
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