I’m still searching for an alternative title for the “bioblitz” (those terrible war connections!), but as an exercise in nature connectedness, complete absorption, learning, humility and fun with a dash of competitiveness, it has few equals.
Normally a bioblitz involves identifying as many life forms as possible in one place over one day. Since the owners of this 30-acre former farm have an inventory of 1,100 fellow residents already, our goal was more modest: 10 new species for their list. Some additions were admittedly less than exciting. Traps set the night before yielded several of a moth family called “the pugs”: 50 tiny elongated flakes of greyness with lines of minute dark-grey dots. They have names like grey pug, plain pug, shaded and mottled pug, but ours was perhaps the masterpiece in anonymity – common pug.
