numbers game or counting- Forgot something

Wed May 1 16:37:56 EDT 2002

Barb,
Glad to have your post. I was in downtown Newark today and a Mourning
Cloak fluttered across the stress, while a Catbird (Gray Catbird in some
books) looked very lost until it found a chain link fence to perch on. 
Maybe that's in your future. 

Anyway one Mourning Cloak and one Cabbage White doth not a spring make,
but that's today's count. 

Having grown up in Westchester County an hour north of NYC, it was
amusing that most New York staters referred to it as downstate and most
New York City-ers referred to it as upstate. 
Context is everything. 

It sounds like you better get going, with all that ground to cover. I
thought I was radical to annex Staten Island for the NJ book, but it
looks like we should have been more expansive and taken on Pennsylvania
too. 

Regards, MIKE GOCHFELD

Barb Beck wrote:
> 
> 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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