This past weekend, my daughters, a couple of their friends, and I attended the Bio Blitz put on by the Iowa Wildlife Center. The girls had a great time catching frogs and toads, snakes, fireflies and damselflies and getting muddy, and I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with the naturalists specializing in everything from birds, reptiles, amphibians and insects to plants, fungi and lichen. The Bio Blitz is intended to take 24 hours to catalog as many species as possible of living things on the Wildway property, which is the future location of their wildlife rehabilitation center located out by Ledges. This information will be used to plan for land management in hopes of encouraging native species and removing invasive species to heal the land as they heal the animals in their rehabilitation efforts. For us, it was a fabulous educational experience and a great time spent out in the natural world with an amazing group of people.

They will host one more Bio Blitz in September - for more information see the Iowa Wildlife Center website: http://www.iowawildlifecenter.org Any donations for the wildlife rehabilitation center project are greatly appreciated.