Betsy Kerrison Nature Trail bioblitz...

After much planning and behind the scenes organizing, November 6th saw us participate in the first bioblitz to be conducted at the as yet unopened trail that is owned by the Kiawah Conservancy.

Members of the CMNA, Charleston Natural History Society, and the Charleston chapter of the SC Native Plant Society combined with staff members of the Kiawah Conservancy to spend the morning logging findings into eBird and iNaturalist.

It was an early start for some, as the first birding session started at 6am to catch those early birds! It was a fruitful session with 36 individual species identified, with two more that we were unable to ID for a total of 126 birds sighted!

While it was a small group that arrived at 6am for birding, more volunteers arrived for the main session at 8am and logged their findings until noon.

The early morning birding group

We carried on logging bird sightings, too, and added a further 4 species to the list before the end of the sessions. You can follow the link below to the eBird trip Report: 
https://ebird.org/tripreport/430384

In all, 14 volunteers arrived from the various organizations, but the CMNA had a strong showing as 8 of us attended, along with our Clemson Liaison, Kristina Wheeler, accounting for over half of the attendees!

Special thanks to Joel Caldwell, a freelance photographer that has provided the group photo at the head of the page, and to the staff of the Kiawah Conservancy for being there early and providing us with coffee and snacks to keep us going!
Joel, by the way, is also one of the founders of The MARSH Project we recently heard about during a T&D and W&T, and  is a contributor to the Kiawah Conservancy's Roots magazine.

We're hoping that this is the first of an ongoing series of bioblitzes along the trail, so stay tuned!

A brief lesson on iNaturalist