Not everybody jumps to the word "BioBlitz," but I do. For a time, I lived down the road from the Thorn Preserve on the outskirts of Woodstock, where for a weekend each summer expert naturalists with enthusiasts in tow would head out across the former farm field or dip into the neighboring stream to identify everything they could, some 327 species over five years. Just to read their list is to read a poem: spotted salamander, northern slimy salamander, tufted titmouse, cedar waxwing, northern flicker, least skipper, blue-fronted dancer, Halloween pennant, orange sulphur, clouded sulphur, Baltiimore checkerspot, little brown bat, American black bear, hen of the woods, false turkey tail, red maple, sugar maple, white snakeroot, and so much more. There’s even something I'm glad not to have seen: dog vomit slime mold.

In those years, I walked the field countless times, especially towards sunset. I couldn't have told you what many of these plants and animals actually were, but I felt better for knowing that somebody else did know and cared enough to be able to identify nature by its myriad names. More than once, I would've have sworn I'd never seen a bird before I identified it with my Peterson Field Guide, and then began seeing it all the time. Knowledge sharpens my eyes and ears.

Life being life, I missed most of the fun but did get to spend a few hours by the small pond surrounded by reeds with a man who carried a long-handled net and knew his dragon and damsel flies. I thought of these creatures as flying jewelry with their shimmering needle bodies of metallic scarlet or green, but I soon learned that I knew almost nothing as he netted one species after another out of the reeds. I also learned and not for the first time that I'm not much of a naturalist. I don't have the patience. When I hit the trail, I just want to walk, walk, walk. And forget about the scientific names. I studied Latin for three years in private school and promised myself never again. Would you rather read the above list in colloquial English or as Actitis macularius, Plethodon glutinousus ...

Still, I hate to think I'm too old to learn something new. So when I learned of a BioBlitz to be held on a Saturday morning in late March at the Red Fox Ravine owned by the Kingston Land Trust, I was there. Nor was I alone. A veritable mob — at least by my experiences on nature walks — of 30 or more people gathered around two picnic tables offering coffee, doughnuts, and healthier fare. For many, it was their first visit to this property, which I consider one of the most dramatic if hidden corners of Kingston. Seen from below, it's the ridgeline that looms over the Wilbur crossroads. Unseen from below is the deep cleft in this ridge, an old quarry now recast as a dramatic amphitheater (outdoor stage included) between towering cliffs. Near the entrance the cliffs are hanging gardens of mosses, plants, and gnarled Gothic trees that somehow root in the cracks. Father back, the cliffs turn smooth and vertical for our own little pocket of Yosemite.

Our organizers at the picnic tables explained that, technically, this feature was a man-made quarry, not a natural ravine, but I'll still take Red Fox Ravine as a name. A poem waiting to be written. Then we learned the difference between caves, which were carved by water eroding the limestone bedrock, and mines, which our predecessors chiseled and blasted open to in search of material for making cement. A portion of this 20-acre property is owned by the Northeast Cave Conservancy in order to protect one of the most important bat caves in the area. Now that the white-nose syndrome has blighted 95 percent of some bat species we should treasure the hardy survivors we still have in town.

I'm of the old school that learned from well-thumbed field guides and bird call cassette tapes I constantly had to forward or rewind. Now we carry our brains in our pockets. Our instructions for this BioBlitz were to download the iNaturalist app, which identifies everything from your camera, then share our findings with a Red Fox Ravine file. As of that morning, the file had perhaps a dozen contributors. Our job over the next two hours was to provide an explosion of data.

Someone looked up and suddenly everyone looked up. "Bald eagle!" our leader announced at a glance. The black bird circled slowly against the blue sky above the bare spikes of winter trees. I remembered that bald eagles held their wings flat as a plank, unlike ravens and crows who rowed, or turkey vultures who rocked on upturned V’s. I hadn't forgotten everything from my birding years. Moments later, a hawk, mottled brown and white, cannonballed straight down the valley. Quickly, we had sightings for two red-shouldered hawks, one red-tailed hawk, and one bald eagle. Then a fat hump of dark feathers launched out of nowhere to beeline down the hillside to plop land across the road. If you've ever seen a wild turkey fly, you know why they prefer to walk. They look about as graceless as I do at the gym. But already I considered our BioBlitz a stunning success. How many Saturday mornings start with an airborne wild turkey? Not enough.

We divided into groups. I joined the hill climbers led by Tom O'Dowd, a self-proclaimed "tree nerd" who works for the Kingston Land Trust. (He highly recommends Bark if you're looking for your next book.) A former schoolteacher, he had the booming voice and cheesy humor to keep us entertained and forward-moving as we herded up the zig-zagging trail. Someone accepted the assignment of photographing the moss that lay here and there in patches of electrifying green.

"Do we have a scat expert?" Tom asked, halfway up the trail.

"I know scat!" volunteered several women behind me.

The poop wasn't much to look at, a brown slug in a little puddle.

Fox? Raccoon? Skunk? The experts agreed the poor creature had a loose tummy.

Mostly, we talked about trees. (We were too early for flowers. Spring bird migration was still getting started.) Black locust, sugar maple, black cherry, shagbark hickory, red oaks, and more. Some with deeply grooved bark, others with smooth bark, one seemingly trying to shed its outer bark for something better beneath. We also saw signs of the Kingston Land Trust's forest gardening efforts to help native species: a deer enclosure fence, an ailanthus tree girdled as if a beaver had taken shallow bites, and Japanese barberry bushes uprooted and hung upside down from neighboring shrubs. If left piled on the ground, the barberry roots would just reroot and grow back. (I also learned that, ahem, Japanese barberry is now Thunberg's barberry, while the Norway maple is now the Harlequin maple. Our apologies to the Japanese and the Norwegians for naming two of our most hated invasives after them.)

"What's this?" asked Tom after plucking a limp leaf off the ground.

"Big toothed aspen," answered my big mouth. Fortunately, I was right. What I didn't know, and Tom now taught me, was that the aspen leaf, unlike every other tree leaf, has a flat stem rather than round. This unusual feature causes aspens to shimmy and shake in the slightest breeze. A scientist I'm not, but I do love learning nuggets of nature lore.

I confess I left my phone in my pocket. I had too much fun talking with the BioBlitzers, who included an arborist, a gardener, a serious birder loaded with both camera and binoculars. (Twenty-four species for the day, an unimpressive count. The glories of spring migration are still to come.) Most intriguing to me was an older gentleman off to the side, who, unlike everyone else waving around phones, was patiently setting up a low tripod for a camera close-up of a crusty olive lichen patch on a small fallen branch. As I now learned, he'd devoted his past 10 years of retirement (after a 40-year career managing Williams Lumber stores) to studying lichens. He took photos expert enough for iNaturalist to use for identification standards. But 40 percent of lichens can't be identified by photos, so he sent samples to the lichen scientist at the New York State Museum. Fungus, he explained as he pointed to a golden brown stripe along one side of a fallen branch, can only live as long as they have rotting wood to feed on. Lichen, on the other hand, are fungus that have learned to farm by hosting algae that generate nutrients from the sunlight. Lichen can live for a thousand years, a fact I found heartening in these tenuous times. He happened to live across the street (52 years) so he knew this hillside well. Easily 50 or more lichen species could be found on the surrounding trees and rocks, though as the quarry was only 100 years old, they were still rather young. Up in the Catskills, mountaintops had been bare for 14,000 years.

As it turned out, we knew some people in common from the small world of Catskills naturalists. He described what must have been an all-star hike up Slide Mountain with the leading experts in trees and old growth forests, flowers, geology, and himself to cover the lichens. Everything in sight at least one of them could identify. The last generation before iNaturalist. One of them, he told me, had recently died: Sam Adams, who'd been a pediatrician by trade but also a world-class moth expert and a great advocate for naturalist studies of the Catskills.

The news stung. I hadn't seen Sam Adams (or his dear wife Delia) in some years, but, surely, I was here on this BioBlitz because of him. I'd quit Midtown Manhattan for a Catskills log cabin in 1996, the same year of the first BioBlitz held at a park in Washington, D.C. Hungry for nature, I found my welcoming committee at the monthly meetings of the Olive Natural Heritage Society held in the Adams barn, which had been converted into a science lab and herbarium. The group had published the results of their three-year survey of Olive done with the help of many experts (a siege rather than a blitz) as The Askokan Catskills: A Natural History, the perfect introduction to my new home terrain. It had clear descriptions of the geology, habitats, plants, animals, and early Native American history. There were also long species checklists in Latin, sort of like a phone book for everything that lived in the town. Among the hundreds of moths, I happened to notice that Sam Adams had discovered a few species new to science. How many people have I met who could say that?

I didn't become the naturalist I might have dreamed of at first. I became a peak-bagger instead, bushwhacking through the dense mountain top spruce/fir forests rather than pausing to listen for the diminutive Bicknell's thrush. But I treasured knowing the people who knew what I didn't.

Back at the bottom of the trail, the BioBlitzers were done for the morning, but many still lingered by the picnic tables, sharing stories since they worked for interconnected organizations. Our BioBlitz may have been a fun outing, but serious science is afoot at Red Fox Ravine. With the help of Scenic Hudson, the Institute of Ecosystem Systems has launched a three-year study to better understand urban biodiversity in Kingston, Poughkeepsie, and Newburgh. Ecology, as a science, has long preferred to study nature in natural settings. (Who wouldn't?) But how about nature in cities where many of us actually live? How healthy are our ecosystems? How do we benefit? How are we threatened? (Shall I bring up the subject of ticks?)

For this study, the researchers want to collect reams of data from various locations around Kingston, ranging from vacant lots to the Midtown linear park to Red Fox Ravine to the marsh pond that has developed in a permanently flooded parking lot at Kingston Point. Experts will survey these plots. A wildlife cam has already spotted bobcats, bears, and a fisher in town. But really they're hoping that those of us with iNaturalist apps will be their eyes and ears. After this morning's results have been tabulated, we will have identified 75 species at Red Fox Ravine, including 46 plants, six insects, 15 fungi, one amphibian, and one mammal. Well, two, if you include us.

Nearby, a young boy had better things to do. He crouched beside a log marking the head of a parking spot in the gravel lot. He'd seen a salamander, he was certain, despite the dubious faces on the adults around him. He yanked out a foot-long rotten wedge, and there it was, a shy, slender, oily black creature with tiny paws. The boy shoved his phone close and got it, an Eastern red-backed salamander.

And there I was back with Sam Adams on a field trip he'd once invited me to join at the Huyck Preserve in Rensselaerville, a pleasant if ordinary woodsy property with a pretty pond that had, in fact, been the field station in the 1930s and 1940s for the man considered the father of ecosystem ecology, then the new study of interactions in nature beyond the previous focus on individual species. When we visited, though, I sensed that those glory days were long past. Or. at least, the bearded director had a dour manner and smoked a lot of cigarettes. But red-back salamanders were his subject of study. I learned that they're our most common salamander (I later found one under my doormat right in the heart of Woodstock), but I doubted I'd ever noticed one until that day. Had Sam Adams now returned to me as a salamander? (My late mother had returned as a ruffed grouse.) I'd like to think so. Nature, after all, is more than data points. Nature is how we understand what counts in our lives.

Will Nixon is the author of "The Pocket Guide to Woodstock."