Dam Bioblitzing: Final Wrap-up

As my week of bioblitzing was wrapping up, so were my classes. Add to that an eager 6-year-old, who wanted to help with spring preparations by cleaning the pond-with windex-and you can see, I've been busy.

I never did get around to counting the flora in my two bioblitz locations, but I have no regrets. This has been a wonderfully enlightening experience for me. While my counts don't show it, I managed to stumble onto one of the richest ecological niches in my area. I've visited site A at Standley Lake regularly since moving to this part of town. Now, I'll be visiting site B (B is for beaver!) on a regular basis as well.

I probably need to get back to studying for finals, so I'll keep this nice and short. This weekend, I visited both sites. On Sunday, as you may know from this post, I went to the lake, but I didn't actually count anything besides the same pair of geese and a poacher. On Saturday, however, I went to site B around sunset, in hopes of seeing the beavers in action.

As soon as I arrived, I spotted a beaver (Castor canadensis) swimming across the pond. Unfortunately, my arrival scared it off. It swam into a thicket and disappeared. (I assume the "lodge" is probably down there somewhere.) A beautiful red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) was not as shy. It was circling overhead at first, and then perched on the highest branch, watching me carefully:

I walked around a bit, but saw nothing save a lone mallard. Here, I would have started counting flowers, trees, cattails, and that sort of thing, but it was already getting dark. So, I headed back to the beaver dam. Sure enough, the beaver had come out of the lodge, and was swimming laps across the wetland. I tried to take a picture, but my camera isn't fond of low light... I returned with a bunch of blurry photos.

This sounds like a disappointing run: only three species counted. On the other hand, it was a quiet and relaxing way to close up the week of bioblitzing... just casually watching the engineer of this diverse habitat. Even though National Wildlife Week has ended, I look forward to doing this again over the course of the summer.

Identified Wildlife Counts:

For the weekend:

Kingdom: Animalia

• Phylum: Chordata
  • Class: Aves
    • Order: Anseriformes
      • Family: Anatidae
        • 1 Anas platyrhynchos (Mallard)
    • Order: Falconiformes
      • Family: Accipitridae
        • 1 Buteo jamaicensis (Red-Tailed Hawk)
  • Class: Mammalia
    • Order: Rodentia
      • Family: Castoridae
        • 1 Castor canadensis (American Beaver)

Total:

Kingdom: Animalia

• Phylum: Chordata
  • Class: Aves
    • Order: Anseriformes
      • Family: Anatidae
        • 2 Branta canadensis (Canadian Goose)
        • 7 Anas platyrhynchos (Mallard)
    • Order: Ciconiiformes
      • Family: Ardeidae
        • 2 Nycticorax nycticorax (Black-Crowned Night Heron)
    • Order: Falconiformes
      • Family: Accipitridae
        • 1 Buteo jamaicensis (Red-Tailed Hawk)
  • Class: Mammalia
    • Order: Rodentia
      • Family: Castoridae
        • 1 Castor canadensis (American Beaver)
      • Family: Sciuridae
        • 1 Cynomys ludovicianus (Prairie Dog)

Photo of a red-tailed hawk by the author.