numbers game or counting- Forgot something

[Barb Beck]

Michael,

We have a far different situation than you do.  Far less people and a heqq
of a lot more area to cover.  As I said Pollard like walks are fantastic but
they only get "nice butterfly areas" where people like to walk.  We have
people doing some of these but they cannot even start to get a picture of
the vast area we have.  They only get areas which are within easy travel
distance of the people involved.  We have a very big province here.  The
entire NE corner of the thing has only recently been opened up. Pretty sure
that has more area in it than the state of Florida. Take a look and compare
the size of the province with the size of New England!  I know that it might
come to a shock to some in your area of the country but the whole world is
not like New England.  Furthermore the habitats are far more diverse in this
province than you find in the east.  We go from dry sandy prairie sand dunes
to prairie wetlands to the many types of Boreal Forest from pure spruce to
pure aspen-parkland, muskegs, bog, fens, and foothills, and mountains and
high alpine regions.  Often our habitats are isolated in seas of
inhospitable habitat making things like some of our butterflies essentially
island species.  You are dealing with a far more uniform habitat and a lot
more people.

Sorry but we are doing what we can.  I feel some picture is much better than
none at all. You obviously think it is worthless. When we get the nubers of
people built up the level of the birdwatchers we can probably have repeated
transects which are randomly assigned run throughout the province... like
those of us who run Breeding Bird Survey Routes.  We are not to that point
yet.  I am not willing to sit here and do nothing until we get there.

If I could not see that we are finding at least some useful information with
these counts I would not be busting my tail to get a bunch of them off the
ground nor would I be spending my time trying to assure that things are
reported correctly.  Not that that matters to the NABA who trash a bunch of
our data buy their dogmatic "conservative taxonomy" they practice.


I know it comes to a great shock to some in the NE US that they are not the
whole continent of North America and that the entire continent is not
exactly like them.  Sorta like the king of Siam in the King and I. His map
of Siam took up almost the entire world - other countries just tiny
insignificant parcels on the edges.  Somehow living there gives some people
a skewed picture of the world.  I remember when I was in university meeting
two eastern university students who tried to explain how the Pilgrims were
the first European settlers in the US - heqq there was a University in
Florida when that motley crew set foot on Plymouth rock.  My roommate one
summer from Boston (a graduate student in education) used to talk of her
aunt who lived "way out west in Ohio".  when I was complaining about the
Stokes CD guides to birds and how the Boreal forest birds were left off the
western CD set I was told that Alberta is in the east - GEEZ part of our
province sits further west than LA and we are supposed to be in the east!!

A lot more work has been done on your butterflies than has been done on
ours.  That is why the naming committee from the NE US can happily sit on
their hands - use Oplers names for your butterflies and yet have us have to
live with Scotts lumped versions until who knows when.  They say it is so
people do not get confused but people in the west had switched to Oplers
names then the NABA comes out and says we must revert to the old names used
by Scott which do not reflect the diversity we have.  It almost seems like
it is a ploy to sell a certain field guide which uses those names.  It is
absolutely absurd that Scotts names were not good enough for the Easterners
that make up the NABA nameing committee and yet they are what those of us in
the west are supposed to still use these old names when much research has
gone on since their creation to refine the set.  Guess that makes sense to
people who cannot tell the difference between a shotgun and a net but it
does not fly here.

Anyway must get the igloo cleaned and clean the moose carcass out of the
back yard (the latter is for real)  Might even get warm enough to see a
butterfly today.

Barb Beck
Edmonton

-----Original Message-----
From: Michael Gochfeld [mailto:gochfeld at eohsi.rutgers.edu]
Sent: May 1, 2002 4:58 AM
To: Barb Beck
Cc: cmbb at sk.sympatico.ca; Lepslist; TILS-leps-talk at yahoogroups. com
Subject: Re: numbers game or counting- Forgot something


I certainly agree that a single count in early summer can't represent a
butterfly fauna in a meaningful way.  In our club I've tried to
encourage people to select a particular place (park, powerline cut, etc,
to census every 2-4 weeks throughout the season.  I do this behind our
house.

But it lacks the party atmosphere of an annual count.  MIKE GOCHFELD

Barb Beck wrote:
>
> Martin pointed out something I left off.
>
> The fact that we have only one butterfly count per summer is a real flaw
in
> the setup.  There should be several to correspond to our various butterfly
> seasons.  Hopefully as we get more people involved we will be able to do
> more than that.  Right now we are just getting snapshots at one time of
the
> year per circle.  In some areas like around Edmonton we have many counts
and
> run some of them early and others late but in the rest of the province we
> just do not have the manpower. We are getting snapshots around the
province
> on a variety of consistent dates since it is not convenient to hold them
on
> the 4th of July Date.  Our routes that are associated with BBS route and
the
> Cold Lake Count which is held in conjunction with a University field trip
> are end of May - early June each year.  These counts must be held then
> because it is the only time the people are in that  area on a consistent
> basis.  Our mountain counts are late and we have a few counts near
Edmonton
> which are held late each year.  In other words we are getting snapshots
> under the current rules of butterflies at various seasons but
unfortunately
> not multiple snapshots per season at one place.
>
> It would be nice if the rules were amended for multiple counts in one
circle
> BUT right now I would just like to see the species we have properly
recorded
> and not have our data lost by the practice of "conservative taxonomy".
>
> Barb Beck
> Edmonton, Alberta


 
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