Taking inventory

Part of the daily routine of butterfly watching for this project is logging each sighting on a data sheet. This sheet lists all the species that have been seen on a particular transect in the past - and there are also blanks for ones that we need to add, which we do from time to time. We have had to write in several new species for a transect.

Today we walked transect 4. It had nine sections. For the entire transect we saw a total of 39 species and 189 individual butterflies.

Sometimes we need to look in our butterfly guide to determine the species - we are not using common names of butterflies - but Latin. Viet and Lien both know most of them but sometimes even they have to look.

When we begin a transect (a trail, defined by our research scientist) we first must log our name, the time, the temperature and humidity - both of which are read using a digital meter.