What is it?
A BioBlitz is a concerted effort to discover as many species as possible in a set amount of time. We’ll be looking for plants, animals, butterflies, moths, insects, fungi, reptiles – everything!
There will be specialists present to help with identification, as well as pursuing their own search activities. We’re hoping these will include overnight use of moth and small mammal traps.
When is it?
Sunday 2nd June 2024, 10:00 to 16:00, although our specialists will be doing things outside these hours.
How to find us
Use the entrance to the wood near the Crematorium. Turn right, and our base camp will be nearby on the right-hand side of the main path. You can park in the main Crematorium car park, although as this is all about nature we would encourage you to use as “green” a means of attending as possible.
Base camp
The base camp is the centre of activity. Come and introduce yourself, and find out what’s happening and when, and what’s been found.
What to do
Everyone is welcome. There will be nature walks led by members of Warwickshire Wildlife Trust and other specialists. If you like, you can just “do your own thing” and go and search. We can suggest what to look for and where in the wood to look. If you have specialist knowledge yourself, then you’re particularly welcome to participate in whatever way you can.
We’ll have some activities suited to families with small children, such as searching for species that should be relatively easy to find. We also hope to have some pond dipping activity.
How to contribute
If you want to contribute to helping us to find species, then come prepared! We will be using the iNaturalist app to record species, and you can install this on you phone to do your own recording. Alternatively, you can just take photographs using your phone’s camera and bring them back to the base camp for identification. If you need to transfer any images to us for recording purposes, you can use WhatsApp (see below).
Facilities
- Toilets – available at the Crematorium.
- Sorry – there will be no refreshments, so bring your own.
- No power, so make sure your phones are fully charged.
If you need to share photos that you’ve taken on your phone, we’re using WhatsApp. (If you are using iNaturalist you won’t need to do this as any photos are captured by the app.) You’ll find details of the WhatsApp group to join when you arrive. We’ll assume that by doing this you’re OK for us to include your photographs in records that we may create to record the results of the BioBlitz (we have to ask this for copyright reasons).
Identification apps
There are phone apps available to help with identification of birds, plants, fungi etc. You could try these:
- iNaturalist – general identification and recording
- Merlin – bird identification
- PlantNet – plants
and there are many others which we haven’t tried.
Other useful apps
- Organic Maps – online and offline map based on OSM data (the same as we use for our maps)
- OS Locate – tells you your current OS co-ordinates