Taking action for wildlife: The power of community science

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:07

Welcome to another episode of the everyday environment podcast where we explore the environment we see every day. I'm your host, Amy Lefringhaus.

Karla Griesbaum: 00:15

And I'm your cohost, Karla Griesbaum.

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:18

And today, we're so happy to be with Allen Lawrance. He is the curator of entomology at Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, and he's gonna talk to us about community science and how we can get involved in, you know, wildlife related science or just science in general. We're so happy that you're here, Allen. Thank you so much for for being with us today.

Allen Lawrance: 00:44

Oh, thank you so much for having me.

Amy Lefringhouse: 00:46

Cool. Well, first off, we'd like to start most all of our episodes just kind of like having our guests tell us about, you know, who you are and what you do.

Allen Lawrance: 00:59

Alright. Well, I'm an entomologist at the Nature Museum, so I basically have I dip my toes into all things bugs here at the museum. My main areas of work are to manage the Butterfly Haven, which is a greenhouse full of tropical butterflies, so you can walk through, and there's no glass between you and the butterflies. It's a fun time. I also work on some butterfly conservation programs at the museum.

Allen Lawrance: 01:24

So we try to restore populations of locally imperiled butterflies in natural areas around here. There's one species we're working with currently is the Baltimore checkerspot. And then what I'm here to talk about today is community science. I co direct the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network.

Amy Lefringhouse: 01:43

Awesome. My kiddo and my niece and my sister, we went and went through the Butterfly Haven. I think it was last summer, or it could have been two summers ago. It's a really good time. There's, like, photo spots you can take your picture, and I don't know. They're all fluttering around. It's it's a pretty pretty cool area. And that is in Chicago. Right, Allen?

Allen Lawrance: 02:06

Right. It's in Lincoln Park in Chicago. And it's my favorite spot in the museum, especially in the winter. You can go warm up, see all the butterflies, and I just feel so lucky that I get to live get to live amongst, but I get to work with live butterflies all year round.

Karla Griesbaum: 02:23

That's so neat that you have it growing through the winter too. I didn't realize that.

Allen Lawrance: 02:28

Yeah, not every butterfly house exhibit runs year round. Quite a few sort of have, like, a cloth or screen enclosure. Ours is a glass greenhouse, so we can stay warm year round.

Karla Griesbaum: 02:40

Awesome. So really basic, what is community science, and how is it different than traditional scientific research?

Allen Lawrance: 02:49

Yeah. So the gist of community science is just science that the community gets to participate in the process in some form. A lot of programs, the way they do this is essentially outsourcing the data collection, and that's how the community science programs at the Nature Museum run. But really, there could be involvement at any step, whether it's analyzing data, helping come up with questions, you name it. And this differs from traditional science, in that basically anybody can participate.

Allen Lawrance: 03:20

You don't need a formal background or training in science. Depending on the program, there might be a little bit of training required, but again, no prerequisites. And what's just so the real difference is that community science can really be done at scale that is really hard to achieve through traditional scientific research. Like, traditionally, if you have one lab group, you have how many grad students, and how many of their undergrads. If we were trying to monitor butterflies throughout the state of Illinois, we either wouldn't be able to hit the whole state, likely we wouldn't be able to hit the whole state, or we would only be able to visit different areas once.

Allen Lawrance: 04:02

And what I think is so cool about our programs is that our monitors visit these sites at least six times throughout the season, so they can capture butterfly or they can detect butterflies that are there at different times of the season.

Amy Lefringhouse: 04:15

I can't remember when community science came along, like, the whole concept, but I feel like it's been within my, you know, lifetime. I I just remember in the very beginning, they're like, oh, you can go out. I think EcoWatch was, like, the first program, if you guys remember that. It's kind of now transitioned into RiverWatch, but that was the first, like, program I participated in and and got to go out into my own creek and collect my own data. And I and then another time, I just remember some folks in Chicago talking about the importance of the protocols, and I hadn't thought of that, like, just because the the protocols have to be really tight. Right? Really very simple, very consistent, I guess, among, you know, community members one after another after another just to make sure that data is good data to work with.

Allen Lawrance: 05:12

Yeah. That is the constant struggle to make sure you can keep the protocol the same over time. The Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network has been running for thirty plus years now. Okay. And if we were to continually update and change our protocol, we couldn't compare the data that was collected earlier on in the program with data that is collected today. So if you if you change it, you can kind of invalidate all the work that you've done before. It's really difficult because there are so many good ideas. Each year, you know, you think, hey, what if we just do this one more thing? And if you keep allowing that over time, you get protocol drift, and you're just not even doing the same thing anymore.

Karla Griesbaum: 05:55

Yeah. Basis of science, right, is having those controls, and that's what the protocol does, right? So it's all consistent.

Allen Lawrance: 06:02

Right. Some programs don't have to worry about the protocol as much. Something like iNaturalist, you know, you're kind of snapping a picture, uploading it online, and then that can document presence. But you can do programs within that platform that have strict protocols, but on the base level, anyone can kind of just snap a photo anytime. That works similarly to the the first citizen science project, community science, citizen science, they're the same thing.

Allen Lawrance: 06:30

Right. The first that I was aware of was a bee spotter, thanks to May Berenbaum, down at University of Illinois, and it it works a lot like iNaturalist, but focused on bumblebees.

Amy Lefringhouse: 06:42

So why you kind of you touched on this a little bit, but why might community science be a good option when study studying wildlife specifically?

Allen Lawrance: 06:54

Right. Just the the scale of the search effort is really hard to do with a small lab group, unless you're really specializing. You know? You can pick one site, one location, and intensely study that, work on restoring one population, like we do with the Baltimore Checkerspot at Bluff Spring Fen right now, we can only do that right there. If we can't do that everywhere across the state at at once, that is that is the biggest thing. But the second, really, is just the benefit of connecting with the public, sharing this information, the process, with everybody. It's kind of like opening the gates, getting rid of the gatekeeper. Mhmm. It really allows people to see the process of science and feel like they can contribute.

Karla Griesbaum: 07:43

And then they have a piece of the game then too, right? I think you care about something more when you're actively involved with it. Right?

Allen Lawrance: 07:51

Right. And you also just you learn more about what's around you, and the more you learn, the more you care. Like, to participate in the nature museums, community science programs, depending which program you're in, you're gonna either you're gonna be learning how to identify either frogs, dragonflies and damselflies, or butterflies. And until you've learned them, you don't necessarily even see them or appreciate them.

Karla Griesbaum: 08:16

Mhmm. Well, that's a great segue into our next question. So coming back to Peggy Notebart, what programs do you have there, and what are you trying to learn from these programs?

Allen Lawrance: 08:27

Oh, yeah. So we have the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network that I will always talk about incessantly, the Illinois Odonate Survey, and odonate is just a term that includes both dragonflies and damselflies, and then the Calling Frog Survey. And what these three programs are doing is we're just trying to monitor, like, the distribution and abundance of these various groups of animals. Big picture. There are also there's a lot of utility to this, and these programs were started for slightly different reasons.

Allen Lawrance: 09:02

Like, the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network was initially started by The Nature Conservancy to use as a tool to evaluate land management practices. You know, if you're clearing out brush, pulling out invasive plants, adding more host plants, you know, you can look at the site and say, yes, the plants look great. But do you really know, are these efforts carrying through to the fauna, the animals that depend on this habitat, and is it helping them too? Mhmm. You gotta you gotta click the data to know.

Amy Lefringhouse: 09:31

So are they are all of those three programs statewide, Allen, or are they specific to the Chicago region? Like, can any can anyone participate in these three programs?

Allen Lawrance: 09:43

Yeah. So the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network and Illinois Odonate Survey are statewide programs. Okay. So anyone in Illinois can participate in those, and the Coined Frog survey is within the Chicago Wilderness region. So if you're in northern Illinois, you can you can do the calling frog survey with us.

Amy Lefringhouse: 10:00

Okay. Do you house the data then there at Peggy Notebaert, or or is it shared amongst different organizations?

Allen Lawrance: 10:09

Oh, yeah. That is a great question. This data is all housed in a centralized database called Pollard Base. Okay. It's called Pollard Base because the protocol we follow is called Pollard Walk.

Allen Lawrance: 10:23

And this houses the data not just for us, but for different monitoring programs that use this kind of protocol throughout The United States, and I believe there's upwards of about 25 programs that are hosted there. Okay. And that pollard base run out of the University of Georgetown right now. Okay. And just as a- as a museum, the way we see this data is we view it the way we view items in our collections.

Allen Lawrance: 10:51

We see that we are holding this data in the public's trust, so it's not really ours, it's the public's, and we just wanna make sure we are stewards of it, that we maintain the integrity of the dataset, and that we make it accessible, so that anyone who wants to look at it can use it. You don't even have to be a scientist. If you reach out to us, we can give you the data if you really want it.

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:11

Yeah. Do you interpret some of that data, like, with do you interpret it in, like, make maps, or do you do some things with that data to communicate with the public?

Allen Lawrance: 11:24

Would like to do more of that.

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:25

Yeah. I know. Right?

Allen Lawrance: 11:26

I'll say that. But right now, this data is being used quite a bit by researchers, who are analyzing that data, and then communicating that information out as part of their research, and we try and communicate out what they've learned using it as well. And what I think is so cool now that we have that centralized database, by pooling all these different state programs together, you can look at regional, national trends, you can, like, study big things that you couldn't do before.

Amy Lefringhouse: 11:57

So the Illinois I'm going back to the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network. So are you looking at all species, certain species? I guess give me a little little tiny bit of a window into what you're looking at for that particular program.

Allen Lawrance: 12:16

Yeah. So for the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network, we are looking at every species of butterfly that is in Illinois.

Amy Lefringhouse: 12:22

Wow.

Allen Lawrance: 12:23

The way the program works, we recruit volunteers in the spring, and then new volunteers will attend a training, and we host those virtually. And at the training, you'll learn how to follow the protocol, how to conduct the surveys in a very standardized way, which is pretty simple. Just to give you the gist of it, you walk a route at a constant pace, and you count every butterfly you see within a 20 foot radius. That's it. But there's a lot of little rules and tips to make sure that we're all doing that in the same way. And the second part of that training is that we will teach you how to identify a list of sort of the top most common butterflies that are widespread throughout the state. Especially your first year, you don't want to try and memorize the 100 plus species of butterflies that live in Illinois.

Allen Lawrance: 13:10

That's difficult. But you can start with 25. Yeah. And then monitors, they'll be assigned a route, and they go to that route six times at least, minimum, throughout the season, and you kinda learn what butterflies exist there. Most of them will be on that top 25 list. A couple, you'll recognize, ah, that's something different. That's when I wanna take a little bit more time to look up and get down, and then you really just notice what's there, and a new thing will start to stick out.

Amy Lefringhouse: 13:40

So how long is the route? Is it like a driving or walking route, I guess, in my head?

Allen Lawrance: 13:45

It's a walking route. They vary in length. They typically take anywhere from about a half an hour to an hour and a half to walk, but this is at a very slow pace.

Amy Lefringhouse: 13:56

Okay. So rural rural folks like I am, like, will you guys assign a route to us? Or or okay. Okay.

Allen Lawrance: 14:08

Well, actually, it could go a couple ways.

Amy Lefringhouse: 14:10

Okay.

Allen Lawrance: 14:10

We have a bank of a whole bunch of routes across the state that we have mapped out.

Amy Lefringhouse: 14:14

Sure.

Allen Lawrance: 14:15

And we only map out routes on publicly owned lands. Okay. For the most part, because again, we want to ensure that this data remains accessible to the public for all time. Sure. Private landowners could restrict access, we don't want that. But if we- and so when you sign up, we will ask for a little bit of information, what area you live, how far you're willing to travel, and we'll match you up to a site as close to you as we can get.

Amy Lefringhouse: 14:41

Cool.

Allen Lawrance: 14:42

If there is no site in the area, either I or someone from the museum will go out and map one for you, or we may ask you to work with us and help develop a new map, and we just use, you know, a downloadable GPS trail marking app on a phone, so anyone really can do it, as long as you can use a smartphone. Yeah. We have quite a few routes in northern Illinois, like the Chicago area. We've done really well adding a lot of routes to southern Illinois, really great areas down there. But we could use more around the central and western areas.

Allen Lawrance: 15:20

So listeners there, help us make some new routes.

Amy Lefringhouse: 15:22

Well, it reminds me of the spring and Christmas bird count. Right? That's what it kinda reminds me of a little bit. I'm sure it's like, a little bit different, but I participated in the Christmas bird count for the first time, which I think is Audubon, for the first time this year, and it was something similar. Like, we had a territory in a route, and we had our top, you know, list of of species that we were looking for, and you just notice.

Amy Lefringhouse: 15:49

Right? It was a driving route, but you just notice the things that you're seeing, and you're you're marking them down. So but we only do that one time, you know, at Christmas time, and but but it's been going on for a while, but it kinda reminds me something somewhat similar to, you know, that if people are familiar with those bird counts.

Allen Lawrance: 16:09

Oh, and I just want to share something similar. It is also done with butterflies, not by the Nature Museum, but there are fourth of July butterfly counts. That's sort of peak season, you know, middle of the summer for butterflies. Different organizations might do their own counts, and then pull them all together. One to look at is the North America Butterfly Association, or NABA.

Amy Lefringhouse: 16:34

Okay. Cool. Cool. So what are the what are some of the most effective ways you've found to engage, like, communities in, you know, wildlife monitoring and conservation in general, or even more specifically with the three the three programs that you have?

Allen Lawrance: 16:51

Yeah. Few different ways. What's most effective in engaging people is sharing how their data is used, seeing that full through line. Because this is this is quite a bit of effort it takes to participate in these programs. People are donating their time, they're going outside, they're really putting in a lot of effort, and people want to know that they're doing this for a reason, and that it's valuable, and it's useful.

Allen Lawrance: 17:21

And the best way to do that has been to share some of the results from papers that have been coming out using our data recently. So that's that's been pretty great. But engaging our volunteers, what's also been really awesome, is hosting summer field workshops. Just getting out there in the field, getting everyone together. You know, this is kind of a solo or pair activity, but butterfly monitors like to get together, share tips on identifications, and that could be a really fun time.

Allen Lawrance: 17:49

So we get two touch points where we do that. We host a summer field workshop, and then we also host our annual meeting in the winter where we go through, you know, the stats from the last year

Karla Griesbaum: 17:59

Yeah.

Allen Lawrance: 18:00

And any other news updates.

Karla Griesbaum: 18:02

How do you do that when you write a paper based off of data that community scientists gather? Do you acknowledge, like, the community scientists at all when you write that paper?

Allen Lawrance: 18:14

Yes. Almost always there, at least in the acknowledgments. But really, these those studies could not be done without the effort of the community scientists. So I make sure in every presentation I give to give a shout out to our community scientists. They've been doing this for so long.

Allen Lawrance: 18:32

We have a number of monitors that have been with us for ten, fifteen, twenty, even twenty five years and more. We generally credit the volunteers as a whole. It is difficult to credit individuals because there are just so many different data collected from so many different volunteers all pulled together, so I wanna give a shout out to everyone. Also, on pollard base, there are you know, you can see who's submitted, like, a lot of surveys, so there can be a little leaderboard, and you can give shout outs that way as well.

Amy Lefringhouse: 19:04

Okay, okay cool.

Karla Griesbaum: 19:06

So going forward from here, what opportunities do you see for the future of community science and wildlife conservation?

Allen Lawrance: 19:15

Yeah. Well, I see that we are- like, this community science is fulfilling a need, and that need is gonna still be there and grow as we face things like climate change. We are seeing declines in a lot of different taxa across the board, a lot of changes in land use, climate, and we need to track what is happening. Also, a lot of folks, as community science gets more popular, more programs are coming on board, so I think just opportunities to engage in community science are gonna continue to increase.

Karla Griesbaum: 19:50

Absolutely.

Amy Lefringhouse: 19:52

Well, I wrote down both of these programs that are statewide just to share with our Master Naturalist group here in western Illinois because we've got some momentum over here, and we're growing. And so, hopefully, I can share with them, and they can start getting some data from Western Illinois. But if someone is listening today and they were like, yes. It is October 30. We're going into winter.

Amy Lefringhouse: 20:17

I want to get myself together to do something in the next field season, right, in the next time we come up, when it starts to get warmer. So what are what's the first thing I can do if I wanna start, you know, volunteering for one of these community science projects?

Allen Lawrance: 20:34

Oh, yeah. So if you want to volunteer for one of the Nature Museum's three projects, you can just go onto our website, and you can sign up even in the fall, put your name in the queue, and then when our recruiting period comes back around, then we'll reach out to everybody, and you'll get all that information, and you'll be set. But if you kind of want to do something now, there are all sorts of community science programs that are, you know, run by a myriad of institutions everywhere. So you what I would really recommend is if there's a natural area nearby that you particularly enjoy, look them up on their website. Look up the landowner.

Allen Lawrance: 21:13

Like, if they're owned by a forest preserve district, look up the forest preserve district website. They oftentimes either run their own, or host, or partner with various community science programs as well. Reach out to the volunteer coordinator, they might be able to match you up to a program, and that's one way you can get involved with a really local program. But you can also check out citizenscience.gov, and they have a really nice, huge list of citizen science programs. Just search through them, see if there's one that you connect with.

Karla Griesbaum: 21:45

I know we just you have your frog call monitoring program up there. We just started one down here too. And so making those connections, like, didn't know you had your own. And so now that I know that, I've gotten calls from people around the state saying, well, I wanna get involved, but I'm not in east central Illinois. So I can say, well, contact Peggy Notebaert. They have a frog call program in the Chicago area.

Allen Lawrance: 22:08

Actually, thanks for telling me that because we have the exact same thing. Say, I'm outside the Chicago area, but I wanna do the calling frog survey. What can I do? So we can start to send them your way.

Karla Griesbaum: 22:19

Right. Yeah. Absolutely. Do you have any upcoming projects, events, or initiatives you'd like to highlight?

Allen Lawrance: 22:28

I would just like to keep highlighting these three programs. They run every single year, and we're always looking to expand and keep it going.

Amy Lefringhouse: 22:38

Will you remind me, Allen, what's the timeline again? Is it the spring that you have? Do have the trainings for all three of them in the spring, or is it the winter?

Allen Lawrance: 22:49

Yeah. I should actually drill down a little bit more. So the Illinois Butterfly Monitoring Network and Illinois Odonate Survey, we combine our trainings together since both those programs use the same trainings will usually run March through May, and then the monitoring season itself will run from Memorial Day weekend, so it just kicked off. Okay. But up here in Chicago, the weather was not good enough to monitor. Yeah. And then for butterflies, it runs through August 8. For odonates, it continues on through mid September.

Amy Lefringhouse: 23:27

Okay.

Allen Lawrance: 23:28

And then the calling frog survey, I'm a little fuzzy on the exact dates, but frogs start calling much earlier when it's still cold outside. So I believe their monitoring season begins in February, so their trainings are typically in January.

Amy Lefringhouse: 23:43

Wonderful. Allen, is there anything else you want to highlight before we before we wrap things up that we didn't have?

Allen Lawrance: 23:50

Yeah. I just wanna highlight some of those big questions I mentioned earlier that, you know, the butterfly monitoring data, not just ours, but all these state programs combined together, are just starting to answer. I mean, we're looking at butterfly declines throughout the United States. Spoiler, they're declining.

Allen Lawrance: 24:07

But for different reasons, in different regions, in the Midwest, another paper came out, certain pesticide regimes. Turns out really bad for butterflies. It was suspected, but we can't actually know this until we have the data. We've also looked at- or researchers have also looked at climate change, how that impacts butterflies' declines and their phenology, and how management can mitigate that. So they found that habitat management can actually mitigate some of the negative impacts of climate change on butterflies. So habitat restoration's important. It works. We need to do it.

Karla Griesbaum: 24:49

I get a lot of questions about how climate change is affecting one thing or the other, whether it's invasive species or, yeah, insects. Mhmm. And I never really like, if there's not good data or a paper written about it, it's really hard to give a solid answer because we don't wanna just speculate.

Amy Lefringhouse: 25:05

Right.

Allen Lawrance: 25:06

Right.

Karla Griesbaum: 25:07

Assumptions based on some of the climate data and the insect data, but it's really nice to have those papers or those resources that tell you, this is what we've seen. We have this data back with us. And that's really helpful to have those three scientists helping gather that data.

Allen Lawrance: 25:25

Yeah. And I just wanna go back to that national paper on butterfly declines that was published in Science, which is pretty cool. Mhmm. But the different regions, you know, we could say, oh, butterflies are impacted by x x x x, but now we can actually say, you know, in the Midwest, there's pesticides are, you know, really an issue. In the Southwest, climate change is more of an issue. Another area, you know, invasive species, or just habitat loss, all the of the classics. But where are they happening? Not just do they happen is very important.

Amy Lefringhouse: 25:57

Right. And we can't without that data, we can't suggest, you know, maybe behavior change or man management changes or, you know, hey. We didn't realize this, but something that we're doing is contributing to this, and now we need to adjust, you know, our agricultural practices or our management plans, etcetera. But you don't unless you if you don't have the data to back things up, then it's hard to to realize, I guess, the impacts that some of our land use is having on on populations.

Allen Lawrance: 26:33

Absolutely. Yeah. It informs management and conservation. Like, if we are trying to rear out an imperiled butterfly to put it somewhere where, you know, it's been extirpated due to human activity, say, the site's since been restored, it has all the host plant, it should be good. Well, if that butterfly can't exist in this area anymore due to effects of climate change, we're gonna spend so much money and time trying to put this butterfly back, and it's still gonna die. It's not gonna take when we could have directed our resources elsewhere where we can actually have an impact.

Amy Lefringhouse: 27:07

Yeah. So shout out to the community science scientists who have already participated in any of these community science projects. But, yeah, if you wanna get involved, it's crucial, crucial for for all of our, you know, management activities and and land use. Well, thank you, Allen, for joining us today. We it was a really enlightening conversation. It always inspires me when I talk to folks like this that I'm like, oh, you know, we need to get some more people doing these types of things and being able to contribute. And and like you said, it's simple to you don't have to have a background in science and and lots of fancy equipment to do this stuff. You can do it on your own. So we appreciate you being here.

Allen Lawrance: 27:58

Thank you so much.

Amy Lefringhouse: 28:00

Well, like every episode, we finish the episode with our everyday observation, and this is where we highlight the mundane and normal of the everyday environment that is actually really interesting. So I'll pick on Karla first to get us started here. What's your everyday observation?

Karla Griesbaum: 28:19

Yeah. You bet. So, Allen, something you should know about me is that I'm a fungus girl. So I really like mushrooms and, like, mycorrhizae, like, those connections and everything. So this time of year is when I start like, there's a lot of mushrooms out in the fall.

Karla Griesbaum: 28:34

And one I came across recently was the shaggy mane, there's a natural area around here that I went to for the first time, and right on the trail, there were shaggy mane mushrooms. And they're kind of neat because they're edible, first of all, but they also once they get older, they create, like, this really inky top, and the ink kind of drips, and that's how they spread their spores. So you definitely don't wanna eat them at that point. But my daughter, she was excited about it, and she would she started collecting the ink and making designs on rocks with it. We were by a riverbed and saw lots of rocks, and so she was just using the ink from the shaggy manes as actual ink, and it was kinda cool.

Amy Lefringhouse: 29:19

That's cool. I had a weird something or other, Karla, I wish you were around, pop up in my garden the other day. But it was like, I feel like I stirred up the mulch, and then it popped up, and it was red and funky looking. And I was like, oh, I wish you I wish Karla was here. She would've I should've taken a picture.

Amy Lefringhouse: 29:37

I didn't do that, but I should've.

Allen Lawrance: 29:40

Karla, you just brought back some great memories from the my time at University of Illinois, when I used to be a TA for the class insects and people. And one of the labs we did was making ink from oak galls.

Amy Lefringhouse: 29:57

Oh, wow.

Allen Lawrance: 29:58

So there's there's an insect connection to ink as well.

Karla Griesbaum: 30:01

Yes. You have nature for so many things.

Amy Lefringhouse: 30:05

That's pretty cool. Well, thank you, Karla. What about you, Allen? What's your everyday observation?

Allen Lawrance: 30:12

Alright. I'm a little curious if you'll find this interesting or or incredibly boring, but my observation was midges. So it's the time of year where we start to see, quite a few midges potentially emerging. I live pretty close to Lake Michigan. So just a few days ago, you know, coming home, I opened my back door, and a little cloud of midges pops off.

Allen Lawrance: 30:36

And for a second, I'm like, what's that? Oh, these buddies are back. And so then it had me waiting to see, oh, is this gonna be like 2022 when we had a mass outbreak of midges, and they were all over the lakefront, and people were freaking out. I got so many phone calls about like, what's going on? That doesn't seem to be the case right now, but it just reminds me how these little insects that seem mundane and and you don't pay attention to unless there's enough that they start to bother you can actually be really interesting.

Allen Lawrance: 31:07

I mean, if you just sort of sit there and watch their little mating clouds do their thing, it's like watching a big flock of birds flying around, but a lot closer. It's pretty fun. And that these things are bloodworms.

Amy Lefringhouse: 31:23

What'd you say, Karla?

Karla Griesbaum: 31:24

I was just I was wondering if you could describe what a midge is.

Allen Lawrance: 31:27

Oh, yeah. So a midge is a tiny fly that looks a lot like a mosquito. If you look at them under, like, a scope, you can tell the difference because mosquitoes have little scales on their wing veins, and the midges don't. But these midges don't bite like mosquitoes do, so they're really quite friendly. And what I implore everyone to do who sees one on your screen door, they just like to rest there, it seems like. They just have these really adorable, super fuzzy antennae.

Amy Lefringhouse: 32:00

That's cool. I've only known a midge as the aquatic portion of their lives. Right? They're aquatic as a larva, I guess, stage proper terminology, Allen.

Allen Lawrance: 32:13

Yeah. That's the proper terminology. They got complete metamorphosis, so their immatures are called a larva, and these, like, non biting midges are bloodworms when they are underwater. So they can spend so much time on the bottom of a pond that could have virtually no oxygen because they're called bloodworms because they have hemolymph in their bodies, and so they can bind extra oxygen and hold it in their bodies when they go down underwater. I've just FYI, insects, except for bloodworms, do not have hemoglobin in their bodies, so it's pretty unique for them.

Karla Griesbaum: 32:50

Interesting.

Amy Lefringhouse: 32:51

Yeah. That's pretty wild. That's pretty wild. That's cool. That's cool.

Karla Griesbaum: 32:56

Amy, what is your everyday observation?

Amy Lefringhouse: 32:59

Well, I was driving along the other day, and, again, this isn't I don't know. I don't have a lot of detail on this one, but I was driving by, and I think it was an eastern kingbird. At least that's what it looked like to me. But it was hovering. Like, it was just hovering in place while I was, like, driving by, and I just thought that was the coolest thing.

Amy Lefringhouse: 33:22

And when I a while back I was doing some, just like some research and looking up. I think it was a whippoorwill I was looking up. But I didn't realize how many different types of feeding behavior there are, there is between different birds, like some of them eat insects and things while they're in flight, and some of them bring them back and sit on the sit on a branch and eat them on the branch, and there's different, you know, of course, scientific scientific terms of what these feeding behaviors are. But I just thought it was cool. This it was just like, I mean, hovering just right there beside me, and it was just neat neat thing to see, I guess.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:03

Again, I don't know, maybe some of you might think that's weird, but it was a cool observation to to see.

Karla Griesbaum: 34:10

And I feel it's not something you see every day?

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:13

No. It was cool. I was like, oh my gosh. Must be I don't know. I didn't know what it was doing, and I only saw it just for a little moment, but it was it was pretty cool to see.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:22

It was neat. So anyway, well, thank you guys for sharing your everyday observation. We really appreciate it. This has been another episode on the Everyday Environment podcast. Check us out next season.

Amy Lefringhouse: 34:35

This is our last episode of this wildlife season, but check us out next season where we're gonna talk about invasive species. So see you soon.

Abigail Garofalo: 34:48

This podcast is a University of Illinois Extension production hosted and edited by Abigail Garofalo, Erin Garrett, Amy Lefringhouse, Karla Griesbaum, and Darci Webber. Marketing and communications are by Emily Steele.

Matt Wiley: 35:03

University of Illinois Extension.