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which_chickYep, gonna talk about odes again. Sorry, folks. Area of enthusiasm. You know how it is.
No, I cannot 'restrict this to summer'. Also, too snowy/icy to ride, so I can't distract myself with horses.
The Frost Entomological Museum, which is part of Penn State, hosts the George and Alice Beatty Odonata collection. (So what? So it's a huge collection and has lots of information about PA odes.) They've digitized tons of stuff and put it online for us, for free. How awesome is that? The papers are here. Look at actual field notebooks. Read old handwriting. Cursive! Yes! Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past come the handwritten field journals of scientists!
They also have on offer an effort by Hal White & Clark Shiffer to generate complete species lists (by county) for the state of PA that has been scanned in. It's here (link at bottom of page, you will need a figshare account which is free). Right now, it's images but I bet you could get rather a lot done with that if you put it in a spreadsheet. Probably a lot of that data has made it into the dot map project over at oc.org but the dot map stuff was a collection of data done by Donnelly and published in 2004. So, it likely doesn't include all the records of the White/Shiffer effort, which continued to at least 2011 nor is it sufficiently focused on PA.
The dot map data from oc.org is all just lumped under '2004' and stripped of meaningful things like date (presumably because T. Donnelly did his due diligence on what was honestly a herculean freaking effort at the time and he should get some kind of award for that). Some of the records of observations in the White & Shiffer stuff are like from 1930's and so forth, really historical, and I'm not sure how far back Donnelly's data went. (I could, y'know, READ HIS ARTICLES. I could. I may yet.) Anyway, it's a disservice to the work of those earlier odes folks to lump all the dot map stuff as "2004", especially if what we want is info on how populations have shifted over time in response to the presence of humans and environmental degradation and climate and stuff. Not sure what I'm going for there, but yeah. White & Shiffer's data look interesting and historically more helpful than the dot-map stuff from OC for my current enthusiasms at the moment.
On a partially-unrelated (bees, who the hell cares about bees?) topic, the F.E.M. shared a really lovely graphic regarding the number of bee species per county vis a vis locales of places with people INTERESTED IN LOOKING AT BEES. There's sort of a D'OH correlation going on there:
Image above is lifted wholesale from Kilpatrick, S.K., J. Gibbs, M.M. Mikulas, S. Spichiger, N. Ostiguy, D. Biddinger, and M.M. López-Uribe. 2018. Checklist of the Bees of Pennsylvania. http://lopezuribelab.com/checklist-bees-pennsylvania/
Kilpatrick, S.K., J. Gibbs, M.M. Mikulas, S. Spichiger, N. Ostiguy, D. Biddinger, and M.M. López-Uribe. 2018. A case study on updating checklists: The bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) of Pennsylvania, USA. 89th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Branch of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), March 17-19th, 2018, Annapolis, MD.
Anyway, there are two points we should all be getting from this VERY NICE graphic that I have stolen. First, the darker blue counties have way more bee species on record than the lighter colored counties. Second, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, the reason for this distribution of species records is very probably NOT because those locales host more bees than the rest of the state. It's almost certainly because those locales host more people interested in looking at bees.
Bees, obviously, cannot be found if nobody is looking for them. If a bee flies in the forest and nobody is there to see it, does it really exist? The same problem is there with other species, like as I have mentioned before with Fulton County and the woefully insufficient odes species lists thereof. Shit, it's a problem with PARS and their records of rattlesnakes in Fulton County. They have four records of rattlers in my county. Four. That is a woefully inaccurate and horribly low number of county records for something as big and easy to count as rattlesnakes. Boots on the ground is a problem all over. *sigh*
But anyway. My somewhat ramble-y point here, in amongst the odes stuff, is that the F.E.M. has a bunch of cool stuff and they tell you about it on a reasonably regular basis at their blog. They may also do instagram and twitter and stuff but I'm a long-format gal myself, so not terribly interested in that crap.
No, I cannot 'restrict this to summer'. Also, too snowy/icy to ride, so I can't distract myself with horses.
The Frost Entomological Museum, which is part of Penn State, hosts the George and Alice Beatty Odonata collection. (So what? So it's a huge collection and has lots of information about PA odes.) They've digitized tons of stuff and put it online for us, for free. How awesome is that? The papers are here. Look at actual field notebooks. Read old handwriting. Cursive! Yes! Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when from out of the past come the handwritten field journals of scientists!
They also have on offer an effort by Hal White & Clark Shiffer to generate complete species lists (by county) for the state of PA that has been scanned in. It's here (link at bottom of page, you will need a figshare account which is free). Right now, it's images but I bet you could get rather a lot done with that if you put it in a spreadsheet. Probably a lot of that data has made it into the dot map project over at oc.org but the dot map stuff was a collection of data done by Donnelly and published in 2004. So, it likely doesn't include all the records of the White/Shiffer effort, which continued to at least 2011 nor is it sufficiently focused on PA.
The dot map data from oc.org is all just lumped under '2004' and stripped of meaningful things like date (presumably because T. Donnelly did his due diligence on what was honestly a herculean freaking effort at the time and he should get some kind of award for that). Some of the records of observations in the White & Shiffer stuff are like from 1930's and so forth, really historical, and I'm not sure how far back Donnelly's data went. (I could, y'know, READ HIS ARTICLES. I could. I may yet.) Anyway, it's a disservice to the work of those earlier odes folks to lump all the dot map stuff as "2004", especially if what we want is info on how populations have shifted over time in response to the presence of humans and environmental degradation and climate and stuff. Not sure what I'm going for there, but yeah. White & Shiffer's data look interesting and historically more helpful than the dot-map stuff from OC for my current enthusiasms at the moment.
On a partially-unrelated (bees, who the hell cares about bees?) topic, the F.E.M. shared a really lovely graphic regarding the number of bee species per county vis a vis locales of places with people INTERESTED IN LOOKING AT BEES. There's sort of a D'OH correlation going on there:
Image above is lifted wholesale from Kilpatrick, S.K., J. Gibbs, M.M. Mikulas, S. Spichiger, N. Ostiguy, D. Biddinger, and M.M. López-Uribe. 2018. Checklist of the Bees of Pennsylvania. http://lopezuribelab.com/checklist-bees-pennsylvania/
Kilpatrick, S.K., J. Gibbs, M.M. Mikulas, S. Spichiger, N. Ostiguy, D. Biddinger, and M.M. López-Uribe. 2018. A case study on updating checklists: The bees (Hymenoptera: Apoidea: Anthophila) of Pennsylvania, USA. 89th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Branch of the Entomological Society of America (ESA), March 17-19th, 2018, Annapolis, MD.
Anyway, there are two points we should all be getting from this VERY NICE graphic that I have stolen. First, the darker blue counties have way more bee species on record than the lighter colored counties. Second, AND MORE IMPORTANTLY, the reason for this distribution of species records is very probably NOT because those locales host more bees than the rest of the state. It's almost certainly because those locales host more people interested in looking at bees.
Bees, obviously, cannot be found if nobody is looking for them. If a bee flies in the forest and nobody is there to see it, does it really exist? The same problem is there with other species, like as I have mentioned before with Fulton County and the woefully insufficient odes species lists thereof. Shit, it's a problem with PARS and their records of rattlesnakes in Fulton County. They have four records of rattlers in my county. Four. That is a woefully inaccurate and horribly low number of county records for something as big and easy to count as rattlesnakes. Boots on the ground is a problem all over. *sigh*
But anyway. My somewhat ramble-y point here, in amongst the odes stuff, is that the F.E.M. has a bunch of cool stuff and they tell you about it on a reasonably regular basis at their blog. They may also do instagram and twitter and stuff but I'm a long-format gal myself, so not terribly interested in that crap.
Not enough time in the world
Date: 2019-01-24 04:59 pm (UTC)Tuesday, 3 April, 1945
For comparison in future years, the following notes on the development of the vegetation were taken:
Many leaves on blackberry stalks
Jack-in-the-Pulpit 4" high (or more)
Mayapples at least half developed
small everlastings (??? sp)
blooming in perfusion
Skunk cabbage 6" to 8" high
Leaves of sassafras about half developed
Now, if you don't spend a lot of time out in squishy territory in early spring, this might look like shit to you. But it isn't. It's a pretty good picture of how far along spring is, and the diversity of species he lists helps level out the weather peaks and valleys.
Most all of his field notebook entries contain...
date (eg. 23 April 1945)
a description of the weather (A rather dull day, occasional breeze, 70F)
time he spent observing (12 noon - 4 pm)
location (Gladwyne, PA) with additional details if needed
There's usually a list of species viewed, with hash mark counts out to the side. Sometimes there are the male and female marks and separate counts for each, sometimes not. But then there are notes -- it's not just "5 of these and 4 of those" but also there are remarks like "At Gladwyne, S. melinus was found for the first time this year but the individuals taken were rather worn, indicating that emergence must have begun at least a week ago."
I'm actually not kidding about the "return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear" part.