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We encourage all of our VMN chapters to check out the City Nature Challenge and consider not just participating, but using it as an opportunity to organize some public events to raise awareness of biological diversity, especially in urbanized areas.

Bioblitzes are probably the best known natural history citizen science events. These are typically periods of biological surveying in an attempt to record all the living species within a designated area. Groups of scientists, naturalists and public volunteers conduct intensive field study over a continuous time period (usually 24 hours) and record what they find. A Bioblitz provides a snap shot in time. While it is certainly not a complete record of what lives in the location, if you take enough snap shots over different times and seasons, you can get a good picture of what is going on there. 

The free iNaturalist app is now more-or-less the standard way for bioblitzes and other citizen science projects to record natural history observations. The beauty of the app is that with a simple uploaded photo, crowd sourcing can then help identify the organism and the observation is recorded so that worldwide any researchers can data mine the info they need. You never know what piece of data you could be providing some researcher somewhere in the world. Here’s a link to various tutorials on how to use the free app: https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/video+tutorials.  

Bioblitzes and similar citizen science events such as the City Nature Challenge offer a lot of interpretive opportunities. To begin with, different teams and their leaders can serve as natural history walks and short programs. Indeed, by getting well-known experts and naturalists to lead groups, you can attract a nice group of interested people, some of which you may discover have great skill or knowledge in certain areas and thus might be recruited
as potential long term volunteers.

The central meeting location which many bioblitzes use can also be places for environmental groups to man booths, activity tables, conduct short presentations, games, and distribute information. Some activities can be geared for younger audiences and the novice or general audience who may just want to see some potential program or show. But the area can also serve to show people unique activities or to have unusual specimens brought back for ID and to show others. Indeed, having people bring back invertebrates for an expert to ID can prove to provide neat discoveries for the public to make. If you stagger teams and activities, people may show up interested in one thing, but be introduced into others they may not have thought they were interested in but are willing to try out. Many people my want to take advantage of an opportunity to be part of expert teams and learn from them in the field. Take for example this short look at a fungi ID team during a bioblitz and the process they used which fascinated many people who had no idea about this wonderful group of organisms. Many expressed interest in learning more about these organisms and were fascinated by the myriad of fungi they were introduced to in their local parks.

These type of biotic survey events can also offer great networking and public relations possibilities. Staff from neighboring jurisdictions and environmental groups have often assisted and provided their expertise for events. I myself have also assisted many other jurisdictions and groups in their bioblitzes, City Nature Challenge, or other events. This allows for good networking opportunities, sharing of knowledge, good will, and unofficially “talking shop.” Media often take great interest in these of public events, as shown in the Voice of America video linked above and much coverage of ongoing citizen science events. 

So citizen science special events have great potential as interpretive and media events. They are rewarding to participants while providing potential data for researchers.  The next big opportunity, and it is repeated yearly, is the global City Nature Challenge April 26-29, 2019. So mark your calendars and give it a shot, either personally, as part of one of the many planned events, or perhaps to run an event yourself. More information can be found here: http://citynaturechallenge.org/ though there are many cities with their own individual websites as (here’s the Washington, DC one I’m taking part in again for example: https://citynaturechallengedc.org/) Your own interpretive moments may help to provide valuable data to researchers while helping you and the public discover the wonders of the natural world all around their parks. 

Just a few feet across the dirt road that runs along the ridge line, a variety of completely different nonnative plant species provide evidence of early British settlers to the area: edible Yellow Hops Clover and Rabbit’s Foot Clover carpet the southern facing slope in the early spring, and sometimes again in late summer. 

The eight acre farm we live on in Toano, Virginia, has been cultivated, hunted and explored for centuries by colonists and for millennia by Native Americans of the Powhatan Nation. Our double-digging of the first garden beds in 2003 revealed such a treasure of bulky 17th century German pottery, broken porcelain and medicine bottles, we happily skipped down Route 60 to Colonial Williamsburg’s archeology department and showed them our haul. 

They were not impressed. “You can’t stick a shovel in the ground around here without finding these sorts of things. Call us when you find brick,” they said. 

Why is it important to understand the habitat this county record-setting animal preferred? Because we did not realize that in tending a meadow of self-planted, naturalized and native plants, we were also creating and tending a habitat for a “secretive” and therefore rarely seen Eastern Slender Glass Lizard.

When I knelt down to examine the poor animal that I accidentally hit with my riding mower this past fall, NPR’s Sunday jazz show was playing in my ears through protective headphones. What I saw in the grass appeared to be a perfect music staff: rows of horizontal black lines separating bright, white spaces. I turned over the animal to see if it was injured or dying, but it was missing its head, probably from popping-up to check out the approaching rumbling. The blades are always set at the maximum height of 4 ½ inches, so I was surprised it could lift its head that high, and sad.

“Wow! How cool is that!” came the reply a few hours later from a group of herpetologists. “The animal is an Eastern Slender Glass Lizard. These are legless lizards. Your discovery represents the first observation of this species in James City County.”  The team pointed me to a page on the Virginia Herpetological Society’s website to formally document the “County Record” as a Field Note to be published in the VHS’ bi-annual journal, Catesbeiana. (You can find instructions for this process here.)

Not only was the VHS team as enthusiastic about the find as I was, Paul Sattler, PhD, editor of Catesbeiana, answered my questions about the legless lizard on the phone. As a newly graduated master naturalist (from the Historic Rivers Chapter in 2018), I was deeply grateful for their replies and instructions.

Why was the animal in the north pasture? Why would it be a county record? Why aren’t there many around? The Eastern Slender Glass Lizard, Ophisaurus attenuates longicaudus, is secretive and seldom seen “because they stay in abandoned rodent burrows and under mats of dead grass and other decomposing plant materials.” O. attenuates are “always associated with grassy areas,” but, “Once old field succession reaches the stage where pine and hardwood trees shade the ground, glass lizards decline in numbers,” stated the VHS website.

The website explained that the historical decline of the glass lizard population is attributed to the lack of grassland habitat due to both successional changes and direct habitat loss. Its preferred prey species – grasshoppers – have also declined from overuse of pesticides. 

As a testament to the glass lizard’s former notoriety, a substantial body of folklore exists around their ability to autotomize their tails. Believing the glass lizard to be a snake, folklore tales claim the broken pieces will grow back together after sunset and form a complete “snake” again. A series of notes in the Martinsville Daily Bulletin in September 1967 describe just such an incident, and the people involved claimed they saw the pieces reassembling. 

It’s easy to see how anyone could mistake the glass lizard for a snake. However, legless lizard
s differ from snakes because they have eyelids (can blink), external ears and eat smaller, more frequent meals than snakes.

As part of its conservation of Virginia’s native, wild herpetofauna, and specifically the glass lizard, the VHS recommends that, “Observations of any kind should be reported,” and that, “Any consideration of long-term management for this species must include the maintenance of grassland habitat.” 

And this is why official county records are important to conservation efforts, explained Sattler in a phone call. “We have to tell the state what we found and where and how many every year. The state enters all of that information into the database at the US Fish and Wildlife Service. They keep a record for each county and have for decades. For James City County, there has never been a glass lizard reported. This is the first one. That’s why it is a new county record.”

Dr. Sattler graciously eased my conscience about hitting the beautiful legless lizard and offered a little kudos on meadow management. “Because you’ve maintained the habitat, they have a safe place to live. It’s great you hit the one you did so you know that they are there. It’s great that you have the photo and video of where you found it,” he said.

The Eastern Slender Glass Lizard James City County Record was published as an official Field Note in the Fall 2018 issue of Catesbeiana this past December. My original Sunday jazz inspired name for the animal, the Write Your Own Song Snake, will remain an inside joke in our family, continuing the glass lizard’s long folklore tradition. I promise to turn down the headphone volume and keep an eye out for our new meadow resident this year.

For our 2019 recertification pin, we decided on the species (the American Chestnut), and then we invited all VMN volunteers to submit photos and artwork representing that species.  We were completely overwhelmed by the fabulous response!  We have extremely talented volunteers.  In the end, we asked seven individuals in the Virginia Department of Forestry (folks who know both our program and chestnuts well)  to serve as our judges.  We are excited to not only share the winning artwork by Linda Duncan in our Old Rag Chapter (featured above), but also all of the submissions (below).  We think this collection is such an amazing and diverse representation of this iconic species that we are looking for other ways to feature it, with the artists’ permission.

Click on any image in the gallery to enlarge it and to see the name of the artist.