Due to the pandemic, the 2020 Bioblitz took the form of a special ‘Backyard’ edition, to allow social distancing. Anyone with even a tiny backyard or balcony was invited to join in to help document backyard biodiversity across T&T.
Despite heavy rain, the weekend was an overwhelming success, with nearly 7,000 observations and around 1,400 species identified!
The five most commonly sighted species were:
1- cane toad or crapaud
2- bronze anole lizard
3- ruddy ground dove
4- great kiskadee
5- blue-grey tanager
More unusual sightings included several species of snake, a capuchin monkey and the endemic Trinidad stream frog. It also highlighted the abundance of invasive and exotic species in our backyards, such as the African giant snail and the lesser Antillean whistling frog – both of which appeared in the top 50 species seen.
In addition to the usual naturalists and interested members of the public taking part, we were delighted to see many schools incorporate the Bioblitz into their virtual lessons this year. We hope that, like us, they enjoyed discovering the incredible biodiversity that lives right on our doorstep.
There is still a lot of work to identifying less well-known species and coming up with final totals – so the most interesting findings may be yet to come... Thanks to everyone who took part this year!