The Lewis and Clark expedition in the 1800’s was famous for not only traversing the country from East to West, but of scientifically collecting and describing several new species (e.g., Clark’s Nutcracker, Lewis Woodpecker). In a similar vein, on Friday evening, Sept. 11, two faculty members in Fordham’s Department of Biology, assistant professor J. Alan Clark and instructor Kevin Matteson are organizing a small group of student explorers to listen for katydids and crickets starting at 8 p.m. on the Rose Hill campus, moving across the street at the New York Botanical Gardens, and then, hopefully, into the grounds of the Bronx Zoo after hours (with permission of course).
The event is part of a larger area project, the New York City Cricket Crawl, sponsored by Discover Life, a non-profit group created to assemble and share knowledge about nature and to promote education and conservation. Part of the reason for the count is to help determine the status of Common True Katydids in the New York City area—there is some evidence that the katydid has been disappearing from certain boroughs.
Members of the Fordham community are invited, and the group has set up a blog but is still in need of bloggers and/or techies to help submit data as it is collected.
“The program is all about things happening in ‘real time,’” said Matteson.
Details on the project in this link: or you can email Matteson and Clark.
