BioBlitz

Photo used with permission from Don Kirchoff Photo used with permission from Don Kirchoff

(Front left to right) Don, Susan, Elise and Scott Kirchoff. (Back/top) Brenda Kirchoff. The Kirchoff kids chomp the watermelon they grew on Kirchoff Family Farm (1958). Today, that farm is called Kirchoff Prairie. TWA Member Don Kirchoff said, “Those watermelons were the sweetest I ever ate.” (Left to right) Don, Brenda, Scott and Susan Kirchoff. Together, the Kirchoffs own and are restoring the 200-acre prairie that used to house their family farm.

Article by MARY O. PARKER

Picture it: five siblings dressed in 1958 garb, footlong watermelon slices placed across the real smiles underneath. Joy emanates from the image picturing the brothers and sisters relishing a reprieve from the hard work of farming and the heat of a Texas summer day.

The Kirchoff kids, Scott, Susan, Brenda, Don and Elise, helped grow that sweet summer treat they savored so much. They also did the back-breaking work of row cropping, pig raising and cotton picking on the 200 acres that their parents Leroy and Brunhilde Kirchoff, bought in Wilson County near Floresville in 1954.

The farmhouse where the photo was taken still stands, but much else has changed since those days. Leroy and Brunhilde passed away in 2008 and left the land to the children. And, in 2016 they lost Elise, too. But the family stopped growing watermelons, raising livestock and doing everything else that made the place a farm long before that.

Today, this slice of tallgrass Blackland prairie no longer goes by the name Kirchoff Family Farm. Instead, it uses the moniker Kirchoff Prairie and has been under conservation easement with the Native Prairies Association of Texas since 2013. The goal now, as Don put it, “is to restore the property, as much as possible, to the condition it was before the Europeans first arrived.” In that context, the Kirchoffs are planning their first BioBlitz.

“They’re planning a what?” you might ask. Consider that “bio” means “life” and blitz “a swift barrage.” Put those together and a BioBlitz amounts to a snapshot of all organisms on your land taken in a quick and intense manner.

Typically, a BioBlitz lasts for one 24-hour period which includes nighttime if the landowner has the means to collect data in the dark. You want to blitz on the same date, during the same hours each year. Many landowners hold BioBlitzes more than once a year, depending upon their land management goals.

The National Park Service (NPS) held the first known BioBlitz in 1996 at Kenilworth Gardens in Washington, D.C. Since then, especially with the introduction of citizen-science driven smartphone apps such as eBird and iNaturalist, their popularity has grown.

It’s early-spring when TWA member, Don Kirchoff shows me around the family’s grasslands to talk about the upcoming BioBlitz. Thanks to Snowmageddon 2021, not much spring has sprung yet, but I do see a hint of prairie verbena, and its pastel purples and the bright yellow of cowpen daisies color the fields.

Today the wind blows hard and makes me glad I’ve worn my hair up. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to spot the monarch butterflies that try to casually float by. But the stiff breeze calls their bluff—no casual floating today.

“That switchgrass gets up to 9 feet tall!” Don said, pointing at the horizon. Last year’s switchgrass rises so tall that even a pump jack in the next field appears small in comparison. The childlike wonder in his voice brings to mind the little boy who, as a man of 77, confessed to me that yes, he and his siblings did sometimes playfully spit those watermelon seeds at one another.

The closest thing to a BioBlitz the Kirchoffs have done so far is an annual wildlife survey. That’s thanks to the hard work of Pat Merkord and others at the Native Prairies Association of Texas (NPAT). Those efforts create a partial baseline for comparing the BioBlitz data.

If the folks at NPAT were doing this year’s survey, they could’ve added another Burrowing Owl to their list. In lateMarch, the folks from Blackland Prairie Raptor Center brought a once-paralyzed bird to Kirchoff Prairie for release. Before the new addition, these environs hosted at least one, maybe two, of the tiny owls.

On our way back to the farmhouse, we passed a wise and wrinkled mesquite. A bird box hangs from it, charmingly crooked, one of dozens on the land, all built by Don. And then there are the birds. In particular the Northern Bobwhites, which we flush on our way to the barn. The days when flushing quail felt familiar are long gone from my muscle memory, and the sound of their sudden rise sets my heart to tapping.

Don’s pointed into the brush, “They’re still there.”

Sure enough, I count at least six.

At home two weeks later, I called both Brenda and Susan, the remaining Kirchoff sisters. Brenda shared with me how it took her months to learn the native prairie grasses, but the simple shape of windmill grass resonated and took hold. Too, the hands-on experience of being involved in its planting helped.

Don told me that when they were kids, they stopped seeing turkeys, deer and Northern Bobwhites. So I wasn’t surprised to see his big smile when he said, “Within two years of getting native grasses back the quail came back.”

This provides a great visual of just how tall native switchgrass can grow in a native prairie ecosystem. TWA Member Don Kirchoff stands next to fullgrown switchgrass from last season. The grass is an important part of the prairie ecosystem in large part due to its size and extra-deep root systems.

BIOBLITZ ASSIST

Planning:

• https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/bioblitz/

Doing:

• Texas Master Naturalists: https://txmn.tamu.edu/ • Native Plant Society of Texas: https://npsot.org • Audubon Society of Texas: https://tx.audubon.org/

TWA Member Don Kirchoff explained that within two years of adding native grasses to their tallgrass Blackland prairie ecosystem the Northern Bobwhite had returned.

Photo by Jeff Parker/ExploreinFocus.com

Share, Store & Analyze What You Find:

• iNaturalist: https://www.inaturalist.org • eBird: https://ebird.org/home

Other Info:

• TPWD – specifically this URL: https://tpwd.texas.gov/ education/bioblitz/participate

The Kirchoff kids could’ve told you how to pick cotton. In fact, the family once had to pick 11 bales. They could’ve also told you how to prepare soil, plant corn and cantaloupe and how to tend pigs, cattle, doves, chickens and goats, among other animals.

They could’ve also told you the best place to be on a hot afternoon: the very same spot where they chomped that watermelon. Susan laughed when she told me, “That rainwater cistern near the farmhouse was the coolest place around.”

Now, if you asked them how to do a BioBlitz, even after seven years devoted to prairie restoration, they’d tell you they don’t know how. Technically, I reckon they don’t, but these folks know an awful lot by now. Perhaps, the truth is they’ve learned a landowner’s most important lesson the hard way: after the first few years of mistakes, you learn to listen to the experts.

Thus, they’ve turned to the Bexar Audubon Society and the Alamo Chapter of Master Naturalists for help with their BioBlitz. Both organizations have graciously agreed to help them with the details. The Kirchoffs have scheduled two springtime blitzes. One takes place the first week in May and focuses on birds. The other, focusing on plants, insects and mammals, takes place a week later.

Patsy Inglet, President of Bexar Audubon Society, heads up the bird-focused blitz, which, fittingly, everyone calls the “BirdBlitz.” At Kirchoff Prairie, Inglet will oversee four teams of four volunteers. Every team member has done bird surveys before.

Inglet recommended that landowners conduct separate blitzes just for birds. “If you have too many people stomping around it flushes the birds,” she told me.

The result? Bird surveyors grow frustrated and landowners receive inaccurate results. Accurate bird counts matter, Inglet insisted, because birds act as important bio-indicators.

The Kirchoff Prairie boasts quite a few old mesquite trees full of character. Most of them also boast a bird house built by TWA Member Don Kirchoff.

Don't Forget The Fun!

Want to do a BioBlitz but not sure you’re ready to get that serious just yet? Then don’t!

Get the kids and grandkids involved by making a game of seeing who can discover the most species on your property that no one else in the family has noticed before (don’t forget the plants!).

Enter what you find into iNaturalist using smartphones. Thanks to the help of citizen scientists, there’s a good chance that within minutes of uploading your images your “new” species will be identified. That evening, host something akin to “popcorn and movie night” to share your discoveries with one another.

Remember: BioBlitzes can be as casual or as structured as you want them to be. They just need to resemble a “blitz” – that is, they take place quickly and intensely – and focus on living things (hence, the “bio”).

Want to make it a tad more organized, but still not too serious? Kick off a family-and-friends-and-neighbors Blitz. Divide participants into teams of 3-6 people (be sure to include children!).

Then, designate certain slices of your property to each team.

You can even create areas closer to your house as “mini” territories for small children and/or those with mobility issues. For toddlers, consider using hulahoops as mini-mini Blitz territories.

Top all the data-gathering all off with a traditional Texas BBQ during which you share what you learned during your day of Blitzin’.

And don’t just limit your blitzing to daytime. Consider a moth cloth to trap myriad moths. If you’ve got game cameras, consider placing them in different spots than usual such as game trails through the brush not easily available to off your own beaten path.

Prepre for your blitz by making log piles throughout your property at least six months before the start date. This gives creatures like lightning bugs, pack rats, and armadillos time to moved in and established enough for participants to spot.

Another good way to prepare is to choose a few areas where you’ll let the grass grow. Taller grass attracts different critters than cut grass. Make sweep nets (“butterfly nets”) available for blitzers so that when they explore your tall-grass regions they can scoop up some of what they discover.

“They eat just about everything,” she said. “Insects, rodents, other birds, seeds. Birds tell you a lot about what’s going on.”

If birds rank high on your blitz list, Inglet suggests surveying them three times per year: spring, fall and winter. In fact, as I researched this piece, I discovered that summer BioBlitzes in Texas rarely occur. When it did, herps were the exception. Makes sense considering how blistering hot the Lone Star State gets.

What you do after your BioBlitz ends actually has a lot to do with what you do beforehand: make a land management plan. Texas Parks and Wildlife Department (TPWD) offers free assistance with that via its Technical Guidance Program (www. tpwd.state.tx.us/landwater/land/private/). They’ll help you determine which goals best suit your land type and location. In turn, that helps you determine what data points make the most sense for you to collect and, consequently, analyze during your BioBlitz.

If this is your first blitz and you have no previous data against which to compare your findings you can still learn plenty. For example: Do you have more—or fewer—invasive and non-native species than you expected? Did you turn up species you hoped to find? Or, did species you hoped to find go missing? On that note: were food sources missing that certain species needed?

If, after all the inputting and sorting and analyzing, you still haven’t ID’ed some of what you photographed, hold a BioBlitz “after party” and get everyone together again to give identifications another shot. That also provides an opportunity to debrief about how the blitz went.

“The goal is that as the diversity on the ground grows, the list created from each consequent BioBlitz grows longer,” TWA’s Director of Conservation Programs Iliana Peña said. “So as the land supports more plants that means there is a greater diversity of insects, therefore a greater diversity of birds and a greater diversity of wildlife; an indicator that you’re doing good work.”

This article went to press before the folks at Kirchoff Prairie conducted their BioBlitz, so I don’t know yet what they discovered.

Last I heard, the released Burrowing Owl seemed to be faring well. I hope that by the time you read this the tiny bird will feel fully enmeshed into its new grassland home. Until the blitz is done, I will wonder if the Bexar Audubon group located the owl and so were able to count it during their BirdBlitz. I will wonder if they counted more Northern Bobwhites than NPAT did last year. And I’ll wonder, too, if the blitz turned up any horned lizards.

There are, however, two things I will not wonder about:

1) How contagious the Kirchoffs’ passion for their prairie restoration work is because I know that it is very contagious. As Iliana Peña put it, “[They’ve] done a phenomenal job of engaging volunteers to help them with their efforts.” Indeed!

2) And I will not wonder if the BioBlitz teams led by Alamo Master Naturalist VP Peter Hernandez triumphed over those oh-so-difficult-to-ID native prairie plants; I am sure they did. I am also sure they did not find any watermelon seeds… or did they?