Great Southern Bioblitz at Scott Bader (Pty)!
We decided to take part in the Great Southern Bioblitz for our city, eThekwini (Durban: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/great-southern-bioblitz-2022-ethekwini). I managed to persuade some lepidopterist friends to come up to site. In town was Hermann Staude, one of the world's top moth experts, who was president of LepSoc Africa before me and is just finishing a Field Guide to Moths of Southern Africa. Plus a few youngsters and a Mom. We put up a couple of mercury vapour moth traps (they don't harm the moths) on Saturday evening, and came back at first light to photograph what we'd caught. We didn't only get moths... spiders, beetles, a real mini-menagerie. I don't know what the security guys thought of these mad people running around in the dark waving cameras around. One of them told me he regularly sees snakes on the night shift. I'm going to show him how to make iNaturalist records on his phone.
In total we made nearly 90 lepidoptera records, 52 of which have been identified. Over the Bioblitz we made 148 records in total, exactly 100 of which have been identified to species level - and some of the youngsters still have to upload theirs. Hermann still has to identify most of the moths - he's still off in the bush somewhere on his way home to Johannesburg...
We recorded at least six amphibian species - which was very encouraging considering how few we heard when Jeanne Tarrant visited us a few weeks ago. The froggy chorus was deafening in the wetland: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/140388377 (my phone is not too good at recording sound so turn your speakers right up!)
The Bioblitz itself was a great success; nearly 5200 observations across the city with yours truly, Steve Woodhall, 9th in the observers league table with 183 observations and 92 species (I spent some time in one of the nature reserves with some LepSoc friends on the Saturday morning).
The notice I gave the people at work was a bit short, so we didn't get any takers from the staff. Next time I'll arrange a bit more advance publicity.
