Hide your turtles, hide your dragonflies because the Project Wild America Crew is back for our fourth summer! We are super excited to be back out in the diversity of nature that the Greater Area of Jamestown has to offer.
While we follow a similar plan for this project each summer, we are continuing to add more objectives to our growing list of knowledge acquired. This summer we are separating our time into five themed weeks. The first of which will be Roger Tory Peterson and Birds. During this week, we plan to see nature through Roger’s eyes and engage in the curiosity of birds. We plan to bird band, take formal bird counts, and get re-accompanied with the vast variety of species around us. The second week is all about Herpetology and amphibians. This means turtles, frogs, and salamanders! We will attempt to capture and record the elusive species that live in and around the Chadakoin River.
Week Three is our Invasive Species Week which coincides with New York Invasive Species Awareness Week. For this theme, we plan to identify the numerous invasives that target surrounding habitats. This is an important topic, especially when it comes to understanding the ripple effects invasive species have on the environment. Branching off of the connectivity of the environment, our fourth theme will be Biodiversity and Habitats. During this week we will work at identifying as many species as possible, adding them to our already 200-some identified species. We will then figure out habitat indicators for certain species as this helps put two and two together when it comes to identifying habitats. Our final themed week is centered around both Wild America and Human Impacts. During this week, we will look at understanding the affects that humans, waste, and urbanization have on the environment and species around us. We will conclude the week at the Panama Rocks Wild America Festival where nature and its beauty will be celebrated.
The Crew has quite a full summer ahead of them, considering on top of the aforementioned objectives, each Saturday we are participating in numerous public outreach events. To get more details on those, please visit our Events 2018 tab.
We are excited and hopeful that we will continue to build on this unique project, all while basking in the intrigue that nature has to offer. So, if you see us out and about Jamestown, feel free to come up and say hi and ask us what we are working on; we are always eager to involve the public!
native to an environment. They usually try to push out the native species; having the natives die off. We usually look at them as pests, or terrible. But they do give a bigger and more competition to the native species, which can be a good thing but also a bad. One of the most known invasive species in Western New York is the Japanese Beetle. In my opinion there’s nothing good about these insects. More invasives are Curly Pondweed, Zebra Mussels and Honeysuckle.![1402879245_9c832c7132_z[1]](https://projectwildamerica.files.wordpress.com/2018/07/1402879245_9c832c7132_z1.jpg?w=192&h=129)
to the area, and this is a huge problem. It is common to introduce another species to control invasive population, or attempt to decrease it through other means. The Zebra Mussel is an invasive species flourishing in Chautauqua Lake, and it causes many problems within our lake ecosystem. It is important to keep an eye out for invasive species in our area!
eds covering the banks near the water. I remember the park crawling with wild life my first year on the rowing team. Then a couple years later the city started construction on the park to make it prettier and attract more people. As the park underwent construction the park lost some of its wild life, but soon after the park was finished the life came back to it.
Shell turtles. Just last week the crew of PWA caught and marked the second musk turtle in the state of New York.
of how beautiful they are up close.
n the rocks near the water or go kayaking down the Chadakoin to see all the beautiful wildlife there is in Jamestown NY.
ny paths throughout the park. While hearing the chirp I had a flashback to my grandparents backyard, remembering what my grandfather said. I surprised myself by knowing it instantly.
What a way to start our second-to-last week as the Project Wild America Crew! Bright & early on Tuesday morning, where was the Crew? In bed? At the Roger Tory Peterson Institute? Nope, try the middle of the Chadakoin River. You see, this week starts our theme of Bioblitz. Bioblitz is basically just us trying to identify as many species as we can in the Jamestown area. And what a better place to identify as much as we can than one of the most diverse places in Jamestown: the Chadakoin River. We dipped our kayaks into the chilly water around 8:30 a.m. at McCrea Point and started identifying from there. To make it more interesting, our crew leaders made it a competition. All eight of us crew members were challenged to each identify five to ten different species without overlapping with one another. While this may have started a few quarrels among the crew, we were still successful! I don’t have enough room to list it all, but I’ll give you the lowdown for each category.
Later in the week, we attended a presentation at the Roger Tory Peterson Institute about moths. There was an indoor presentation which lasted about an hour with time for questions. After that, we all went out in the dark to check on the moth sheets our presenter and his team had set out earlier to attract the moths! We identified the species that we caught, learning all sorts of interesting facts about the moths around Chautauqua County. Both of these activities were also open to the public and it was a fun adventure working with everyone who attended!
Bats are the only mammals which are able to fly, and their skeletal structures are far more similar to our own than that of a bird. There are bats which feed on insects, on fruit, or on liquid, such as nectar or even blood. Vampire bats, however, do not feed on human blood, more often feeding on the blood of cattle. They inject an anticoagulant which numbs the spot they bite and keeps the blood from clotting, so that they may lap up as much blood as they need. We do not have any of them in our area though. A single insect-eating bat will consume millions of insects a night, and can fly many miles from their home. Nectar-drinking bats have extremely long tongues to help them drink nectar from flowers, and some have tongues longer than their bodies! Many bats use echolocation to find prey and navigate, but some use enhanced hearing or sight to find their way around and to hunt. Bats will usually either make their homes in trees or caves, and many will move into attics or barns, but they are mostly harmless.
I was never very interested in moths or bats, but now that I know how much there is to learn about them, I’d like to know more!
coming in many different shapes and sizes. However, the biggest salamander of all is the Hellbender. These amphibians are the largest aquatic salamander in the United States, and the third largest aquatic salamander in the world. They can grow over two feet long and look very odd with a flat head, long wrinkly body, and brown spotted skin. They typically live under large rocks or boulders in streams and rivers, and are mostly nocturnal. They eat crayfish, small fish, and tadpoles. The species of hellbenders found in New York are Eastern hellbenders, while another species, called Ozark hellbenders, are found in Missouri and Arkansas. The Ozark hellbenders are endangered, while the Eastern hellbenders is a species of concern. Hellbenders do have lungs, however, they rarely spend much time out of the water. Most of the oxygen hellbenders need is absorbed through its skin, which is part of the reason why hellbenders are becoming endangered.
Hey guys! It’s Lauren here, so far my favorite part of this internship was the turtle trapping! It was quite the experience, I feel that we all got closer as a group as we trucked through the mucky waters of the Chadakoin. The Stenotherus odoratos anso known as the musk turtles. Musk turtles like to live in rivers, creeks, and other shallow bodies of water that have a muddy bottom that they can forage for there food. Which consists of insects, small fish, and even carrion that they find at the bottom. It was a little nerve racking that we could not see our feet through the water and you wonder what every little thing that touches you is but that is kind of the fun part you never know what you are going to find. You might even lose a shoe in the deep mud or just get stuck cause the mud is up past your knees. But I love getting down and dirty with the turtles and trying to see why these musk turtles are only in this small part of Chautauqua county and the only spot in western New York. So it was cool that we got to be part of the first musk turtle to be marked in New York State. They are not invasive to the area except maybe to the fishermen that catch them on there lines cause they will not second guess biting someone if they are messed with and they excrete a foul musky odor from sweat glands on the edge of their shells . These little aggressive and smelly critters can get to 3 to 5 inches and the average lifespan in captivity is 54.8 years. I have really enjoyed this and can not wait to do it again!