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Photo by Philip Bouchard
Join Sonoma County Parks and the California Academy of Sciences in the second of a series of Sonoma County grassroots bioblitzes! Located in Sebastopol, Ragle Ranch is a 157-acre park featuring an outstanding grove of oak trees. A nature trail leads to Atascadero Creek, a great site for birdwatching. The park is also the site of a peace garden with a spectacular sculpture created by world-renowned artist, Masayuki Nagase.
A bioblitz is an intensive one-day study of biodiversity in a specific location, bringing scientists and volunteer citizen-scientists together. Together, we’ll look for snails, birds, mammals, frogs, butterflies, other insects, spiders, trees, worms, flowers, and everything else we can find! People of all ages and skill levels are welcome!
Encouraging your students to participate in this Ragle Ranch Regional Park Bioblitz and/or other bioblitzes with their families and friends is a great way to help them connect to your classroom units on ecosystems, biodiversity, and conservation. Or, round up some chaperons and bring your entire class on a bioblitz field trip.
What to bring and where to go
- Bring your curiosity and tons of enthusiasm!
- Bring your smartphone. Don't have an iNat account yet? No problem! Sign up for an iNaturalist account, then download the app. We’ll enter observations in iNaturalist and join together at the end to find out how many observations we made and how many species we found.
- Bonus: camera, binoculars, and magnifying glasses.
- The fun starts at 12 noon on Saturday, April 9 at Ragle Ranch Regional Park. We'll explore the park and document everything we can find for a few hours, then we'll all come back together to upload our observations, see what everyone else found, and get help with IDs.