The ‘Great Southern BioBlitz‘, or ‘GSB’ for short, is an international period of intense biological surveying in an attempt to record all the living species within several designated areas across the Southern Hemisphere in Spring.

We had a lovely & productive time in Cowra at our Bioblitz event on Monday 27 October.

Alice joined us from Bathurst – she’s one of our regional co-ordinators & along with Tracee, helped local student Patrick with some plant I.D’s for his TAFE assignment. Meanwhile Margie, Karen & myself (Amanda) focused on recording the different insects we’d found under some rotting wood. Up on the hill Annie spent her time focusing on the birdlife, capturing both their calls & photo’s before uploading that data to the iNaturalist app.

On the day we were also joined by Central Tablelands Local Land Services & their guests from the local Aboriginal Land Council, plus we had Suzie & her film crew (Nviro media) who joined us to capture the day’s action as part of their Landcare story-telling contract.

Find of the day was a chocolate lily which Tracee made sure we all sniffed! I also found a Bogong moth hiding in the crack of our office door so that was also exciting – the moth has now been uploaded to the Swift mothtracker webpage that tracks the migration of Bogong moths each year. Finally, we spotted a Christmas beetle that was either very early for this Christmas or extremely late for last! In either case, it’s been a bumper year for these glistening bugs and we were happy to pop it into our count.

So how did we do this year?

For the last three years we’ve added our Bioblitz data to the Central Tablelands Regional project and this year was no different. Overall we had 12 Mid Lachlan Folks making 141 recordings across the Bioblitz long weekend which equates to 20% of the people across our Central Tablelands Project collecting 27.5% of the total readings. Not a bad efford all up.

How does that stack up against last year?

Last year’s Central Tablelands project was significantly larger than this year. I’m not sure why but my top guess would be around the timing of the event. This year’s Bioblitz clashed with the Backyard Bird Count & school holidays when many people go away – indeed many of our regulars who would ordinarily take part were away. Our Mid Lachlan figures for 2024 were 11 people taking part and making 300 records across the weekend. The lower record numbers were definitely due to key personel being away or tied up in other things.

While Bioblitz remains quite a small event for us, it’s definitely an event that packs a lot of value for those that take part. I’m going to be putting a bit of time and energy into promoting Citizen Science more generally and the Bioblitz specifically across our area over the next ten months or so in the hope we can make 2026’s survey bigger and better than ever. Let me know if you want to help out!

We’re big fans of Citizen Science here at Mid Lachlan Landcare so if this looks, sounds & smells like your kind of fun, get in touch as there’s always something to get involved in.