I wrote extensively in April about the City Nature Challenge (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5), a competition among the citizens of selected cities to post nature observations. The competition used the site iNaturalist.org, a place for citizen scientists to post observations of animals and plants.
I did not think we would use iNaturalist much after that, but I was wrong. Since then we have begun to use iNaturalist routinely. We are finding it useful for a number of reasons.
How is it useful?
Alternatively, click on the link below to see all of our observations.
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View alchemist2000's observations » |
Better yet, what I like to do is to go to the iNaturalist calendar for our finds and click on the date to see what observations we recorded on that day. Each of the pictures is a link to our full observation. That includes not only a picture or pictures, but a map of where we made the observation and points on the map for other people's observations of the same thing. It takes "scrapbooking" of our nature adventures to a whole new level!!
Seeing what other people are doing. What has been surprising to me are some of the other uses of iNaturalist beyond just recording our finds. Since other people also use it, it gives us a way to see what other people are observing and where.
I routinely look to see what others have reported at LLELA. Seeing their observations has made me aware of many many things I did not know even existed.
For example, we were well aware of great blue herons. We see them all the time at LLELA and at Lake Park.
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| Great Blue Heron |
However, based on other people's reports we became aware of several other types of herons. For anyone that has routinely been around water and marshes these may seem common place, but we had no idea these other birds existed. Seeing other people's posts introduced us to the different species and gave us an incentive to look harder to see if we too could find them. It has been a great adventure.
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| Green Heron--yea, it is not really very green, but that is its name. |
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| Yellow-Crowned Night Heron -- He must be asleep; he is standing on one leg. |
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| Little Blue Heron |
Learning more about what we are seeing. Finally, and probably most importantly, for newbie naturalists like us, iNaturalist is an aid to identifying what we see. Once we post our identification, whether only generally (bird) or a specific specie (yellow-crowned night heron), we get feedback on the accuracy of our identification. That is especially important when I mess up and get the ID wrong. It is really helping us learn.
Dragonflies. For birds or for many butterflies identification is not too bad. It just takes time. However, for dragonflies and damselflies, the input from experts has been essential. A few of the types of dragonflies are readily identifiable. Among the easiest for us are the Eastern Pondhawk and the Common Whitetail, both of which we see in great abundance. Even with these they were tricky at first because the genders look so different.
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| male Eastern Pondhawk |
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| female Eastern Pondhawk |
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| male Common Whitetail dragonfly |
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| female Common Whitetail dragonfly |
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| juvenile male Common Whitetail dragonfly (the wings of the male but the abdomen of the female) |
Some of the others I find confusing. Even though the male and female within a species look totally different, one may look nearly identical to another totally different species. For example, male and female Blue Dashers are totally different, but I still sometimes confuse the male Blue Dasher with the male Eastern Pondhawk.
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| male Blue Dasher dragonfly |
I always have trouble differentiating the female Blue Dasher and the female Great Blue Skimmer. For them it seems to come down to leg color and color on the sides of their thorax (chest). That assumes, of course, that the pictures are good enough to make such differentiation. Sometimes the critters don't cooperate with the perfect pose to make these distinctions.
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| female Blue Dasher dragonfly |
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| female Great Blue Skimmer dragonfly |
Damselflies. That does not even address the damselflies, which I find another order of magnitude more difficult to identify in many cases since there are so many species that are very similar looking. Despite that, they are so neat and so little...often only an inch or so in length...they are still worth the effort.
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| Fragile Forktail damselfly |
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| Blue-ringed Dancer damselfly -- You can see how tiny he is (about 1.25" total length) next to the screw in the decking of the bridge |
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| Blue-fronted Dancer damselfly |
The Amazon elves have brought me a whole series of new guide books which are incredibly helpful. However, having input through iNaturalist from lots of experts has really helped. Most have been very patient with me since I think they know I am trying....and, of course, they can see the Frog usually supplies really good images.
Hopefully you can tell I am having loads of fun with this.
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