The Egret Article

By Howard Williams

An all-too-common refrain from both children and adults is: “do we have to there again, we’ve been there twice already…” after a suggestion for where to go for a walk or nature study. When it comes to being even a dilettante naturalist, I consider it important that repeat visits to a place, like voting, should be undertaken both early and often. Why? Because nature evolves throughout the year, a snapshot in Spring is very different from one taken in Summer or Fall, or even a few days after your last visit. As a practising geologist I soon learnt that repeat visits to exposures of complex rocks, under different lighting conditions, often allowed repeated observers to spot new mineral growths, structures or fossils, and that’s for things that don’t move or hide.

I have been dipping into an interesting and stimulating book these last few weeks that illustrates this point. The book title is: Light rains sometimes fall: A British year through Japan’s 72 seasons; written by Lev Parikian. In this book, Lev uses a traditional Japanese technique whereby the natural year is divided into 72 equal portions of about 5 days each (see: https://www.fieldandnest.com/journal/japans-72-poetic-micro-seasons). In fact, back in 1789, Gilbert White, England’s first ecologist did a similar thing in his book: “The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne”, wherein he recounts a mass of phenological data in the form of collected letters to friends. The process of providing a description of the environment for each short time segment encourages an observer to be more aware of small changes in the environment, just like Feederwatch.

I like Feederwatch because it encourages the discipline of making observations on one or two days a week – keeping a lookout for birds, counting the number of each species, watching them interact, noting when in the day they arrive and depart. One of the advantages of being gracefully retired is that bird observation time is more available. The key is to have feeders that are easy to see from the house.

Here are some local examples of observations taken during a year or so in Jackson Park where I walk every morning with Douglas the greyhound. I can watch maples and oaks colouring; sudden influxes of gangs of white throated sparrows and yellow rumped warblers; the massing of robins and starlings; hearing and then seeing the Cooper’s Hawk return to an existing nest.

We can start to hear chickadees say their “Hi sweetie”, listening to White-throated Sparrows warming up their “Oh Canada Canada” song, or watch American Goldfinch gradually become a stronger yellow, or the arrival of migrants from the north, such as Redpolls.

Each day it seems as if something different is happening in the park: homeless people leaving their tents and hammocks because the weather is now cold; or the arrival of Red-winged Blackbirds. This Fall there were very few of them and they have long gone. Last Fall (2021), there were dozens of them that perched on the wires and fence posts. Why the difference? Fall of 2021 followed a very wet September, this year it was very dry, so perhaps food was not so available.

One of the joys of watching birds is the anticipation of the arrival of Northern Mockingbirds, or warblers.
It is through repeated walks through a specific place that one can begin to understand how variable the flora and fauna are, both in space and time, and hypothesize about the reasons for these differences.

The website in the following link is a pathway to discovering the migration patters of birds across North America: https://explorer.audubon.org/home?threatOverlay=expand&zoom=3&x=1306099.1620122588&y=2810864.562197212. This website is useful to predict when birds might arrive or depart in your area. An alternative way of doing it is to look, through eBird, at what is being noticed. For example, there is an expectation that Evening Grosbeaks may be making a journey south into Essex this year, driven by food shortages further north.

Another example of repeat visits. When we lived in Stratford, Ontario, an average of 10 members of the Stratford Field Naturalists used to walk for two hours each Sunday morning at 9 a.m. in The Dolan Conservation area, a riparian, woodland and grassland area located beside the Avon River. In winter, rain, snow or shine, birds would be identified, while for the rest of the year, birds, wildflowers and insects would also be identified. Each visit would be concluded by restorative coffee and pastries.

In conclusion, I fully support making multiple pop-up trips to local birding and wildflower watching spots – Essex has so many, and they can teach us a great deal about biodiversity. The ECFNC does not seem to do this as a recognised group – I wonder why not?

By Howard Williams

On a beautiful cool, dew-laden sunny morning, nine members set out to walk the loop in this gem of a reserve.  Over 35 species of wildflowers and shrubs were seen and identified with a great deal of help from the reluctant leader: Carole Donaldson.  Bird observation played second fiddle to plants.

Highlights of the walk were: spotting a stand off between a Preying mantis and a small Garter snake, in a thick dogwood.  We weren’t sure who was wanting to avoid whom.  There are too many plant species seen to mention them all, we saw two species of false foxgloves, four different species of sunflowers, several goldenrods, American Groundnut, Butterfly Milkweed and Tall Ironweed

By Mark Nenadov

The Birth of a Project

Let’s time travel. We’re time-machining to 1992 and I’m writing for the Fall 1992 issue of The Egret.

I’m pitching the concept of iNaturalist and eBird. If I’m lucky, The Egret will print it right after a curious note on page two about the reintroduction of Wild Turkeys to Essex County. Imagine that! Wild Turkeys roaming Essex County–can’t wait to add them to my county list back home in 2022!

Everyone would wonder: who is this strange person? No one would  take me seriously. I wouldn’t get any investors. Just as a simple tiny moth depends on an ever complex web of life, a “simple” website or app depends on a rich ecology of technology and culture. Facebook or Instagram weren’t merely absent in 1992 because the tech wasn’t yet created, they were also absent because everything that surrounded them was different.

You can be a bona fide nature enthusiast without ever touching iNaturalist or eBird. But they both changed the “environment” so to speak and conversely have grown out of the current “environment”. Even if they disappeared off the map, they’ve sure left a mark on things.

Essex County Field Naturalists’ Club has desired to find a way to experiment with integrating iNaturalist as a tool and introduce its members to it. In April 2021, a “Essex County Field Naturalists’ Club Observations” project was created.  Basically, it is an “aggregation project”, it takes a lot of specifics (your individual iNaturalist observations) and ties them together in a broader context (all the iNaturalist observations of club members).

Let’s look at some project statistics and highlight a few observations!

Some Statistics (*Accurate as of August 25th)

So what happened with the iNaturalist project since April 2021?

34 of our members joined. Immediately as they joined, their observations were “sewn together” in a nice wad of observations. 26,538 in total!!

26,538 is roughly 28% of all the observations in our county and something like 0.2% of the global submissions.

This amounts to 3,534 species of plants and animals. Breaking it down further, 208 species of flies, 280 species of birds, 906 species of butterflies and moths, 743 species of plants, 90 species of spiders, etc. You get the drift.

How Is This Significant?

Ok, you will grant that there’s a big wad of data here. But what does it mean?

It’s really, really hard to gauge the significance of these observations. What’s “significant” is very subjective. To whom? For what purpose?

We can’t predict the future. We have no clue what future generations might find significant. Who’d have thought turkeys roaming free almost everywhere in our county would be what 2022 looks like? (Some of our more senior members maybe remember some of those pre-turkeys-running-free days)

When it comes to documenting biodiversity, there’s something to be said for letting others (whether a future scientist or even a future you) determine what’s significant. Collectl, collect, collect, and then let the filtering happen later.

Of course, a true note-taker can’t record everything and tries to have an eye for what is important. On the other hand, though, the best note-takers also have an eye for things that might not seem important now but may have some sliver of significance for the future. Maybe it’s those morsels that you could have easily passed over which become the focal point at some future date!

Ultimately, our collection of data is going to reflect our own fascination and interests. Maybe you are an entomology amateur who is really fascinated by dragonflies. Or a gardener that’s a bit paranoid about that bug and what it might do to your squash pants. Or you are a mushroom forager. Or you’re a bird nerd.  Or an angler who is into fish. Or a student who got hoodwinked into using that app. We do not collect neutrally. However you slice it, our little enthusiasms or quirks or compulsions or curiosities or perhaps desire to graduate has propelled us to submit photos that aggregate to something that is bigger as a whole.

This aggregation is what makes this project what it is. And you never know exactly what will come out of such aggregations. I’d say we should keep on submitting data and see what comes out of it. The kicker is–we will have a ton of fun while we do it and we will learn a bunch.

These observations are also a drop in the bucket compared to what is going on globally, and yet they also tell a distinct story about Essex County’s biodiversity. These 3,400+ species are really special. Just think of all their triumphs and struggles to survive in a hostile environment. (By the way, not far from two thousand of our observations were of species considered to be “threatened”)

Next we will look at some noteworthy observations. I’m not necessarily trying to collect the most rare observations or the most technically perfect photos. I just want to give a sample that is representative in many ways. And I hope no botanists will get on my case for under representation! I suppose the Mycologists (fungi enthusiasts)  and Coleopterists (beetle fanatics) will be even more upset!

Some Noteworthy Observations