The observation period is over!

....But not the CNC fun! More on that in a bit. At midnight, the counts were 25,788 observations, 2,050 species, 1,186 observers, and 488 identifiers. Our midnight standings were 9th for observations, 11th for species and 4th for observers. Mighty fine, and that is FAR from the end of the story!

We have until the end of the week to upload evidence (photos and audio recordings) of our observations made between Friday morning and Monday night. There are lots of things you can do to keep our counts growing!

• Make sure all your own observations are uploaded.
• If you were one of our dozens of event leaders, follow up with your participants and remind them to upload.
• If you encouraged friends/colleagues/neighbors to participate in CNC, follow up with them.
• If you know someone who regularly takes smartphone or digital pictures of wild things in nature, encourage them to upload to iNaturalist. For smartphone images, the time, date and usually location are attached to the photo (or audio recording) as metadata, and items that meet the date and location criteria for CNC-DC will be automatically added to the project.
  

Although new uploads need to be done by the end of the week, the sooner they are posted, the better chance they have of getting confirmatory ID's. Many eyes are reviewing observations this week, and identifiers are working both on their own and attending ID parties around the metro area:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1IL04MQHA5e5c0B0wcUrztZHSOFZM-DTjyNzDgzr6ayY/edit#gid=0

Here are a few tips for working through ID's quickly:

Many observations just have ID's to genus. This is a common error among newcomers, and even experienced iNaturalists can do it by mistake if they're in a rush or working on a small smartphone screen. You can search on, for example, "Toxicodendron" and most of those will be poison ivy (Toxicodendron radicans)--look for a brown-stemmed vine with the middle of the 3 leaflets bearing a visible stem. Possible lookalikes are box elder (green-stemmed tree with 3 or 5 leaflets) or fragrant sumac (middle leaflet has no stem). Similarly, our "Lindera" is Lindera benzoin, northern spicebush.

Other things to search on to pretty easily help your observer get to species:
Cottontail = eastern cottontail
Deer = white-tailed deer
Liquidambar = American sweetgum
Spring beauties = Virginia spring beauty (look for long straplike leaves to make sure it's not Carolina spring beauty)
Dogwood = usually flowering dogwood (look for tree with large 4-part white or pink flowers--fading and browning by now--with a dent or stain at the tip of each "petal"; be aware that there are other dogwoods in our area though)
Skunk cabbage = eastern skunk cabbage
There are others; feel free to post a comment about other common errors you have noticed.

Happy identifying!

Posted on April 30, 2019 12:09 PM by dbarber