It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad Weekend

Page 2

Volunteer collecting samples

Sorting Lepidoptera

Bob Lyon

Moths, Toads and Crayfish:
Eighteen teams of 135 volunteers comb the woods, streams and wetlands of the Potomac Gorge in search of such critters. Located just outside the nation’s capital, the gorge contains a bevy of nationally rare species. Collecting is merely the first step; identifying comes next, and that’s where volunteers like Bob Lyon (bottom) come in. He’s sorting insects for the Lepidoptera team.
Photos © David Nicolas

This Is a Science Lab?
Bioblitz base camp is set incongruously in Glen Echo Park, a historic amusement park—complete with vintage carousel—on the Maryland side of the Potomac. In the 1950s, Washingtonians danced here in a giant ballroom to the Glenn Miller Orchestra and wandered the Hall of Mirrors.

Today, the park still draws a crowd, though not typically a crowd of hard-core scientists and naturalists. Yet at 7:30 on this Saturday morning, those are the folks gathering in a block-long art deco-style building. Dozens of bioblitz participants congregate, greeting old friends and meeting new ones over breakfast. Others set up makeshift laboratories for the weekend—desk lamps, dissecting microscopes, portable libraries of field guides—on long folding tables.

When they achieve critical mass, the participants move to a baby-blue pavilion a few yards from headquarters. As large fans stir the humid air, Art Evans kicks off the event, reminding everyone why they’re here: “Our efforts over the next 30 hours will fill in significant gaps in our knowledge of Potomac Gorge.” He reads a quote from nature writer Jennifer Ackerman: “‘Gaining deep familiarity with a landscape other than your native one is like learning to speak a foreign language … Slowly the strange becomes familiar; the familiar becomes precious.’” He looks out at the crowd: “Take care, and happy hunting.”

Happy Herping
Wes Van Gelder tromps through the brush near a duckweed-covered pond in Great Falls Park later that morning, carrying a dark brown snake 2 feet long and thicker than a garden hose. The northern water snake wriggles furiously, clearly not happy to be there. But 15-year-old Wes is. He tells other team members how he caught it. “I took a dive in the water,” he says gleefully.

Wes and his father, David Van Gelder, live near Richmond and spend many weekends searching the woods for frogs, snakes, salamanders and turtles—“herping,” as aficionados call it. That’s short for herpetology, the scientific study of reptiles and amphibians. When Wes was 9, he kept catching frogs and snakes in the back yard, so David Van Gelder signed his son and himself up with a local herpetology club, and herping became a family affair. Wes and David are now veterans of three bioblitzes. On this trip, David’s 13-year-old nephew, Chris Risch, has joined them for his first.

Unlike most of the other teams, the 19-member herp team is dominated by amateur critterphiles. In addition to Wes, Chris and David—a water and wastewater professional—the team includes a nurse, a stay-at-home mom, and a family of four. Most members know each other from previous trips with the Virginia Herpetological Society, and their shared history has generated an esprit de corps.

David Van Gelder, holding a blue pillowcase, approaches his son, and Wes drops the snake in the bag for a later photo op. Another team member with a clipboard ticks off questions. “Micro-habitat: What was he doing?” “Basking on a log,” Wes replies. The herp team makes field notes about its catches, then releases them.

By the end of the bioblitz, the herp team will have documented 26 species of frogs, lizards, salamanders, snakes and turtles. Such work, says J.D. Kloepfer, a wildlife diversity biologist with the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries, provides a huge boost to state-wide conservation efforts. That may be an understatement. As the lone state official tasked with keeping tabs on Virginia’s reptiles and amphibians, Kloepfer needs all the help he can get.

Most biological surveys occur at remote field locations, where the odds of running into other researchers in the field are long. But as the herp team reconvenes near a parking lot for lunch, team leader Jason Gibson, a high school biology teacher in Danville, Virginia, spots his friend Art Evans, soaking with sweat, still beating the trees for beetles. “Hey, we found some frogs eating your bugs,” Gibson teases. “Don’t worry,” Evans replies, “they’ll get their due.”

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