City Nature Challenge, Part 1

Most of the past few weeks has been devoted to participating in or recovering from the City Nature Challenge.  What is the City Nature Challenge?  Here is the information as posted on the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County website:

What is the City Nature Challenge?

Just in time for National Citizen Science Day (April 15) and Earth Day (April 22), 16 U.S. cities are asking residents of and visitors to these urban areas to explore nature all around them and document the species they find.

Building on the success of last year’s City Nature Challenge between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the initiative’s co-founders, Alison Young (Citizen Science Engagement Coordinator from the California Academy of Sciences) and Lila Higgins (Citizen Science Manager at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County) have expanded the event.

Last year over 20,000 observations were logged by over 1,000 citizen scientists, representing 1698 species in the Bay Area, and 1679 species in L.A. County! What will we find this year, when we look all over the country?

Needless to say, we did not hear about it from that site, but rather from the very active group we follow on Facebook, the DFW Urban Wildlife Group.  I had stumbled upon their Facebook page and website, dfwurbanwildlife.com, a little over a year ago when I was trying to identify the hawk we discovered perched in the yaupon holly outside our bathroom window.  It has been a fun group to follow, since they are heavily into the photography of wildlife in and around places we are very familiar with, including lots of observations at LLELA.  Although we have not attended any of their group get-togethers, we have met several of the members on the trail at LLELA.

In a nutshell, the City Challenge means getting as many people as possible (1) to make observations of nature, (2) to take pictures of their observations, then (3) to post the pictures on the iNaturalist.org website with their identification of the observation.  The observations could be either animals or plants.  The observations could be in a backyard or in a more natural setting, but the plants and animals needed to be "wild", i.e. not pet animals or cultivated plants.  The observations had to be sometime during the five day period of April 14-18 (Friday-Tuesday).  The postings were to be made by midnight Friday, April 21 (although that got extended by about half a day).  Sixteen different metropolitan areas were the "cities" competing for bragging rights.  For purposes of the challenge, the DFW metroplex included ten counties.

It seemed kind of interesting so we thought we would give it a try.  As we got into it we really started having fun.  I guess that is no great surprise.  It is nearly the perfect activity for us, combining photography, walking around in nature, learning new things, computer work...all the things we love anyway!!

We (meaning the Frog) took lots of pictures (over 1500, to be exact), then we tried to identify what we had observed in preparation for posting on iNaturalist.  In many cases the identification step took a LONG time and we were not always able to make a definitive ID.  That's where the power of iNaturalist comes in.  Other people, including some very high level experts, jump in to confirm or recommend changes to the ID. 

Our observations.  We ended up making 156 observations that we posted of which 112 were considered "research grade", i.e. at the species level and confirmed by the community.  I think I am missing a couple of observations, but they breakdown roughly as follows:  66 plants, 43 birds, 29 insects, 3 mammals, 3 ray-finned fishes, 2 reptiles, 2 fungi, 1 mollusk, 1 amphibian, 1 arachnid, and 1 other (which was an earthworm, don't know why he gets "other").

All of our observations were within a few miles of home.

Our observations posted to iNaturalist for the 2017 City Nature Challenge

I am not going to try and document our five days of observations chronologically.  However, since many of the pictures are so outstanding, I will show some of those in this and several subsequent blog postings.

Learning New Things.  The most exciting part of this whole experience has been learning new things and making unexpected discoveries.

Sometimes the new things were just based on our my ignorance.  For example, I did not realize that the top and bottom sides of some butterflies are dramatically different.

We saw this very beautiful butterfly.  I thought surely it would be easy to identify since its markings were so distinctive.  I looked and looked seemingly everywhere on the web and in the few reference books we had without success.  How could that be?

Finally I found a wonderful website, dallasbutterflies.com, that shows both the top and bottom views of the wings.  At least for this guy, a red-spotted purple (yep, that's its name!), his top wings don't show the spots.  Most of the pictures online only showed the plain upper wings.  I went back and looked at some of the other pictures the Frog had taken of this guy.  Sure enough, that was the case.

In some other instances, the quality of the pictures allowed us to observe things that would have been difficult or impossible with the naked eye.

This is a dragonfly we encountered on the trail along the banks of the Trinity River.

Dragonfly on the trail at LLELA

 
Even though I had previously known NOTHING about dragonflies, with a little online research I figured out this was a clubtail dragonfly based on the shape of the tail (duh) and the widely spaced eyes.  I read multiple reports about yellow clubtails that looked exactly like this, so I posted that as our observation.

Note the wide spaced eyes which are characteristic of this type of dragonfly

An expert on dragonflies from Vancouver wrote on our observation that yellow clubtails do not exist in the new world.   Oops.  I had somehow missed that.  Fortunately another dragonfly expert from the metroplex jumped in and said it was a plains clubtail.  Well, alrighty then.

However, in all of this back and forth and close scrutiny of the picture I realized there was a wing sticking down below his chin.  What was that doing there?  Sure enough,  looking at an earlier picture in the series, we could see him using his front leg to stuff a bug into his mouth. 

I had never thought much about what dragonflies eat, but now know first hand that dragonflies are carnivorous.  They are serious predators of other insects including gnats, mosquitoes, moths, butterflies, and even bees. At least according to one site, they can eat their own body weight in as little as 30 minutes.  They can be a real threat to bee colonies, devastating a colony in a very short period of time.  Of course, the good news is that they can also keep down the mosquito population.

The other thing that happened on several occasions was the opportunity to make multiple observations from one photo.  Usually that was for a plant we were not paying attention to while looking at a bird or insect.  However it also went the other way.

We realized after several days that we did not have a picture of a prickly pear cactus.  That is not totally surprising, since we were spending most of our time in more wet areas that are not favorable to cacti.  It seemed like we should have a prickly pear observation, so we checked out some Army Corps of Engineer land along an equestrian trail just northwest of here.  We did not go far since the previous day's storms had left everything very very muddy.  However, we did find a prickly pear and lots of interesting wildflowers.

Yes, there is a prickly pear cactus behind the grass

Wildflowers near the 2499 trailhead of Pilot Knoll equestrian trail:  Texas bull nettle (white flowers in the center), Indian paintbrush (orange flowers in the back), prairie spiderwort (purple flowers in the front).  The buds in the front are unopened Arkansas lazy daisies.  I don't know what the tall vertical plants in the front are.

What surprised me was an unexpected discovery I made after returning home when looking more closely at a blow-up of the cactus picture.  One portion of the cactus was covered with bugs.  

Bugs on a prickly pear cactus

That was great.  The bugs were potential additional observations, but I figured it would be nearly impossible to figure out what kind of bugs they were.  Here is when Google came to the rescue.  I almost immediately discovered that these were called prickly pear cactus bugs (geez, that was almost too easy).  The larger orange and black bug at the top is the adult and the smaller, round bugs below are the nymphs.  Apparently these have been studied to death as possible ways to control prickly pear cacti.

This only begins to scratch the surface of the many new (and admittedly mostly useless) factoids we learned from these five days of  nature observations and the additional days of research to make the identifications.

Even when we were not observing new species, we were having a great time.  After the recent storms, the Corps of Engineers was letting a lot of water out of Lewisville Dam.  The herons and egrets love this since it is great fishing for them.   We spent a long time one afternoon watching these beautiful birds.

The great egrets were easy to spot and plentiful.  

Great egrets

Seeing so many of them now, it is hard to believe great egrets were hunted nearly to extinction in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for their plumes. 

Great blue heron on the Trinity River in LLELA

The birds dive almost effortlessly into the water for a fish then fly back to a perch with the fish in their beak.

Going after a fish

Successful fish grab

Great blue heron flying back to a perch with fish

After manipulating the fish until it is aligned correctly, they swallow it whole.  Just standing there on the bank we watched this over and over again among dozens of birds.  What a spectacular sight on a beautiful April afternoon...and only ten minutes from home.