surrey-bc_biodiversity's Journal

Hard to believe were only two weeks away from our 5th CNC. Have you figured out which greenspace you plan to visit April 26-29? Or are you going to focus on your own backyard, or neighbourhood. Looking to join a local organized CNC event? Check out our CNC page www.surrey.ca/citynaturechallenge for where and when.

Wherever you pick for your biodiversity blitzing make your data count! Remember the 3-Ps: No people, pets or potted plants when collecting observations. Focus on wild plants, animals and fungi, native or not :).

Stay tuned for further updates!

Surrey's Crescent Beach has served as a banding location for the past few years on this federal project. Environment and Climate change Canada would like to highlight that they continued to colour-band adult and juvenile Glaucous-winged Gulls throughout their field sites, and any sightings by the public can be reported using this online form: https://forms.office.com/r/i9PG9zHCfs (feel free to share).

C/o Anneka Vanderpas
Marine Outreach Coordinator, Wildlife Research Division, Science and Technology Branch
Environment and Climate Change Canada, Government of Canada
anneka.vanderpas@ec.gc.ca|

We are just about a month away from our 5th annual City nature Challenge.
Are you getting ready to get your community science groove into overdrive!

Our CNC webpage is up along with dedicated CNC special event listings:
https://www.surrey.ca/citynaturechallenge

BioBlitz at Latimer Park | April 27, 10am-2pm
Have fun with us as we discover bugs, flowers and animals and learn to use iNaturalist to record what you find. Bring your mobile phone to record with, and dress for the weather. Drop-in. Ages 6+.
Location: Latimer Park (19258 28 Avenue)
Hosted by Friends of Semiahmoo Bay Society, Little Campbell Watershed Society, Langley Environmental Partners Society and NatureKids BC.
LEARN MORE > https://inaturalist.ca/projects/latimer-park-bioblitz

BioBlitz at Serpentine Fen | April 29, 5:30-7pm
Celebrate the return of the birds with a City Nature Challenge BioBlitz and scenic walk on the Serpentine Fen Nature Trail in Surrey. Learn how to use eBird or iNaturalist, and how to identify a variety of marsh species! Dress for the weather. All ages.
Location: Serpentine Fen Parking Lot (44th Avenue and King George Boulevard)
Hosted by Birds Canada.
Pre-register by email > krisc@birdscanada.org

"They are the quintessential long-distance migratory songbirds. Incredible journeys, tough-as-nails appearance, and beautifully regal even without the elaborate ornate coloring of their wood-warbler neighbours. And as much as I would love to wax poetic about how this well-postured denizen of Canada’s boreal forest represents Canada – it is in fact a bird that is shared across the hemisphere, with the majority of their time spent on migration and in their Central and South American post-breeding grounds. "
https://www.birdscanada.org/introducing-birds-canadas-2024-avian-ambassador-the-olive-sided-flycatcher

We have 6 occurrences for this species in our area, from Fraser Heights down to South Campbell Heights!
https://inaturalist.ca/taxa/16110-Contopus-cooperi

The Bald Eagle and Osprey nest registry is a province wide partnership managed by the Wildlife Tree Stewardship (WiTS) program with a goal to support the protection of nest trees covered under Section 34 of the British Columbia Wildlife Act. The WiTS Atlas collects Bald Eagle and Osprey nest records provided by government, industry, conservation/naturalist groups, and the public.

The Community Mapping Network (CMN) has a new publicly available mobile app for collecting and recording nest observations in the field. The WiTS mobile app can be used both online (with an interactive base map) and offline by recording your location coordinates. When on-line, the app will help you find existing nests so that you can update nest activity, the status of the nest tree and other important information. (WiTS Survey123 Instructions).

https://www.cmnbc.ca/atlasgallery/wildlife-tree-stewardship/

This university project is looking for locations to set up monitoring traps (which must be purchased by the site host). If you work with a school or other facility where the study could host a trap feel free to reach out to Peter at contact info below.

Dear Colleagues
We are inviting you to join our collaborative network studying insect abundance, the North American Insect Abundance Network (NAIN)(https://uccsplantecology.com/north-american-insect-abundance-network/).
This year we will be starting our 6th year of sampling using Malaise traps at 136 locations spread across Canada and the US. We have found that insect abundance (biomass) is lower in North America than in Germany where biomass declined 75% over 35 years (Hallman et al. 2017. PLoS One, 12(10), e0185809). Biomass also shows significant changes over the past five years of our study, but these trends vary depending on the geographic region of the continent and taxonomic group. We need your help to expand the study and increase our sample size.

Our study is designed to detect insect declines of 1-5% (the long term averages from meta-analyses) with just 1 to 5 more years of sampling. Based on this projection, we are inviting more collaborators to help us determine if there is a continuing, large-scale decline of insects in North America. We also plan to address potential causes of differences in abundance by expanding the habitats sampled to sites such as farms and urban areas with more human impacts.

Our project is designed for almost anyone to participate. The minimum contribution involves setting up a Malaise trap and collecting three samples from it, typically in May & June. Each sampling period is 3 days (72 hrs). Collaborators can sort the samples (to at least Order) and weigh them themselves, or send the samples to me for processing. It does not get much easier.

The main caveat is that I do not have funds to purchase the Malaise trap you need (discounted for this project to about $200 + $36 shipping from BugDorm). If you want this discount on purchasing a trap please contact me asap.

This could be an excellent project for public outreach or school projects. It is an engaging and important question that students and the public can help to answer. Indeed we already have over 10 Nature Centers and NGOs participating.

You can read more about the results of the first three years of our study in the May 2023 issue of Ecology (OA paper at: doi.org/10.1002/ecy.4036). As in the past, all collaborators who send in data will be authors on the resulting papers. If you are interested in participating, please contact me for more information, and please forward this to anyone you think might be interested.

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing from you.

Peter Dunn pdunn@uwm.edu
Emerit Professor of Biol. Sciences
Univ. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

While things have been quiet on the Avian Influenza front of late, the continuing cold, damp weather means birds are still drawn to congregate at feeders. So clean your feeders regularly. In some instances it may be advisable to take your feeder(s) down.

This post from the BCSPCA is a good resource, and includes who to contact if you see any sick, dying or dead birds. https://spca.bc.ca/news/get-the-facts-on-backyard-bird-feeding/

great expose on the evolution of iNaturalist in The Revelator!

"The popular app can help you identify species, but its global community of naturalists is contributing even more to biodiversity protection."
https://therevelator.org/inaturalist-conservation/

Sharing this from the Western Bat Working Group list serve, looks like bats are already out here in the Pacific Northwest! Bats are notoriously hard to document and ID on the wing unless you capture them for surveys (bat in the hand) or submit an audio file from a bat detector. But don't despair about not having a detector. We've had some images submitted for Surrey of bats in flight.

Subject: #FirstBat 2024
It’s time for the #FirstBat of the year campaign! Dust off your bat detectors and add fresh batteries.
Birders record and brag about the first bird they see each year. We can do this too by setting up bat detectors to see which species we first detect.

So set up your acoustic detector as soon as you see this (ideally on the night of December 31, 2023) and detect and identify the first bat of year in 2024! The person who submits the first bat species ID in each state or province wins a prize (see attached), so yes, YOU have a chance to win prizes and glory.
Oh.. you think it’s too cold, rainy, windy, snowy to detect bats? Well.. 1) you may be in for a surprise and 2) the contest runs until April 1 so you can still be first to report a species detected in your state/province.
What to do:

1. Set up an acoustic detector as early as possible in 2024 (or really improve your chances by setting it up now)….or start your nightly bat walks with a handheld variety.
2. Check on the detector every week or so to download data and check battery life (always a good idea with long-term detectors especially in the winter).
3. Identify the species detected on each night of monitoring using your preferred methods (auto-identification software, manual inspection, whatever)
4. Submit results of the species detected and when and where you detected it at: https://forms.gle/toxr2YJEHvfVFHDV9
5. Note, if you have a long time series it will be more convenient to use the instructions https://databasin2-demo.s3.amazonaws.com/batamp/Batch_Upload_for_BatAMP.pdf to upload results from all nights of monitoring (including those when no bats were detected).

6. Please report nights with no species detected or confirmed….knowing when/where bats are not active is also good information.
   Results will be summarized ca. monthly and state/provincial winners announced then. Remember, even if it takes you until April to report your first bat detected, you might still detect the first bat. But submitting results early is encouraged.

Ted Weller
Ecologist
Forest Service
Pacific Southwest Research Station
p: 707-825-2955
theodore.weller@usda.gov

1700 Bayview Drive
Arcata, CA 95521
www.fs.fed.us
Caring for the land and serving people

Some great background info and video on one of our rarest birds in the Surrey area. This cryptic insectivore nests near waterfalls and other steep terrain with moist microclimates.
https://www.birdscanada.org/helping-to-unravel-the-mysteries-of-the-black-swift?

Thanks to one of our top observers, Frank Lin (@fylin), we've had these chunky cousins of the nighthawk identified in Surrey over the past few summers (https://inaturalist.ca/observations/125136000).

Which begs the question, where exactly are they nesting? We don't really have steep canyon-like areas or high waterfalls!