The GRSF Summer NABA count

[Rick Borchelt]

I've been giving this a great deal of thought as we come up to about a month before our July 13 count date in Green Ridge State Forest.  As I noted in the lead-up to the spring count in April, we have some options to discuss.

To be blunt, NABA is experiencing some management turmoil.  This happens to all organizations from time to time, but the current situation appears to have been building for some time, and precipitated by the abrupt departure of the National Butterfly Center director.

This puts into sharper focus some of the more generic concerns I have had with the NABA annual count process.  I generally dislike paying for the "privilege" of volunteering to conduct the counts (and as you know MDLepsOdes -- yours truly -- has paid those participation fees in the recent past, since it is not legal to collect said fees for use of a state resource like GRSF).  

Such fees do not, however, absolve me or any other local organizer of liability in case one of you ends up falling off the overlook. So I regularly ask myself what NABA gives back to us.

I also dislike not having access to our own data once submitted, or to the data from other counts.  NABA keeps a very tight grip on those data, unlike iNaturalist or eButterfly or BAMONA.

And the paperwork associated with conducting and reporting a count is unnecessarily antiquated and cumbersome, as Tom Stock knows all too well as he is currently laboring once again to submit our observations. 

Lastly, because it is an official activity of an official organization, Green Ridge SF staff are now requiring advance permission and additional paperwork to conduct the count.  

So ... I am proposing to end the official NABA affiliation of our summer census of metalmarks and other butterflies in GRSF.  I will still organize INFORMAL spring and summer counts to monitor butterfly populations, but we will no longer be bound by either the arbitrary count circle or the strict one-day parameters.  I think this arrangement will produce a more robust and more representative census of butterfly populations in Green Ridge SF.

And it will be free to participate.

I will submit our data to eButterfly, which now has a bulk ingest mode that essentially duplicates the NABA datasheets.  And it will be freely available to lepidopterists and citizen scientists.  

I'll keep the data as July 13 this year, with July 14 as a rain date or as an opportunity to mop up areas we missed on day 1.  

Before I lock in this new schema or dates, I wanted to give anyone here at MDLepsOdes a chance to weigh in on any issues, concerns, or problems you see with this as a path going forward.  You can reply here or to me personally.

Thanks in advance for your candor and deliberation.  

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Rick Borchelt
College Park, MD
preferred personal email:  rborchelt |AT| gmail |DOT| com

http://leplog.wordpress.com

[mmon...@aol.com]

Rick,

For what it is worth, I was a charter member of NABA. For reasons I will not go into here I decided not to renew for 2024. So while I have only participated in one of your counts, I see no issue with what you are proposing. (Though I am an out of state interloper — LOL!)

Monica

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[Kathy Barylski]

I agree with doing the count independent of NABA. I don't see that participating with NABA has any benefits but has several downsides.

Kathy Barylski 

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[Rick Borchelt]

Thanks, Kathy.  That's my current thinking.

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[waltp...@gmail.com]

I will participate in the GRSF count whether or not it is NABA.

I think there are some really good areas that could be added to the count.

Walt Gould