From Park to Ecosystem
By: Chris Jin
On my first BioBlitz at Hellyer County Park, I thought I was going to spend a couple of hours looking for wildlife.
As a new Naturalist Intern with Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful, I joined a small group of explorers and followed docent Karan Gathani for my first BioBlitz. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. I knew we would be looking for and documenting wildlife, but that was about all I knew.
Not far into our walk, Karan stopped beside a log lying along the trail. It was an ordinary log, probably moved off the trail by someone when it first fell. Karan explained to us that the underside of a log can retain moisture and provide shelter for all kinds of organisms. He also showed us how to safely turn over logs and rocks, flipping them away from your body to give anything underneath an opportunity to move away from you.
We found a black widow with her egg sac, several woodlice, or "roly-polies," and a woodlouse spider.
Karan carefully collected the woodlouse spider and brought it over to a nearby bench. He had a portable digital microscope, and he showed us its fangs up close.
What seemed like a small spider suddenly became a lesson in how spiders have evolved different ways of catching prey. Karan explained how some of the older spider lineages, such as tarantulas and their relatives, have fangs that strike downward, while the more numerous araneomorph spiders have fangs that move toward each other like tongs. This allows them to pinch and manipulate prey, which is especially useful for spiders that capture prey in webs.
As we continued through the park, Karan seemed to have a story for almost everything we encountered.
When we reached the dried creek bed, he pointed out large plants growing along the area where the waterline would normally be. Karan explained that they were giant reeds from the Middle East, an invasive plant that can be extremely difficult and expensive to remove.
The creek itself raised another question. Why was it dry? Karan explained that the Anderson Reservoir upstream had been lowered as part of the project to upgrade Anderson Dam to meet modern seismic safety standards.
Something as simple as a dry creek bed suddenly connected to a much larger story involving infrastructure, water, and the way people interact with the environment.
We also passed trees that looked somewhat like willows, which Karan identified as Peruvian pepper trees. He explained how their seeds resemble black pepper and pointed out several ground squirrel burrows beneath them.
Then there were the western fence lizards, sometimes called "blue-bellies," which we saw along the trail. Karan explained their characteristic push-up behavior as a form of both mate attraction and territorial display. I had seen this behavior before, but never knew what it meant.
Later, we came across patches of grass that had been dug up by wild boars. At first, the disturbed ground just looked like damage. But then Karan pointed out robins searching through the freshly turned soil for insects and other food.
The more we walked, the more we found the extraordinary hidden in ordinary things.
A patch of dirt could be part of a food chain.
A lizard could be displaying to another lizard.
Even a stain on the sidewalk could tell a story.
When we passed an oak tree, Karan pointed out sticky, sappy stains beneath it. He explained that this can be caused by what is known as drippy-nut disease, when bacteria enter an acorn through a wound caused by an insect and an infection develops.
Before the BioBlitz, I had always just assumed the tree itself was sappy, and I often avoided stepping on the sticky patches. Now I was wondering what had caused the stain, what insect was involved, what was happening to the acorn, and what other interactions I might have missed.
I realized that nature is much more interconnected and detailed than I had ever noticed before. Things that once seemed ordinary or insignificant could be part of a much larger story, and learning to recognize those connections changed the way I looked at the world around me. That, more than any single species we found, was probably my biggest takeaway from my first BioBlitz.
I came into Hellyer County Park seeing a park. By the end, I was beginning to see an ecosystem.
One of the things I found most exciting was realizing how much I still don't know. Karan seemed to be able to turn almost anything we encountered into a question, an explanation, or a connection to something else. It made me realize that becoming a naturalist isn't just about memorizing the names of plants and animals. It's about developing the curiosity to stop and ask why something is there, what it is doing, and how it fits into everything around it.
And as I begin my Naturalist Internship, that is something I hope to develop myself.
Right now, I'm still learning from people like Karan. I'm learning how experienced naturalists observe their surroundings and how they share that knowledge with other people. But eventually, I hope I can do the same thing for someone else who is seeing these things for the first time.
That is one of the things that made the BioBlitz such a great experience for me. I wasn't just learning about nature. I was learning how to see it.
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