An iNaturalist Experience

A little after noon on April 21, 2013, I noticed a lizard belly up at the bottom of my swimming pool. I figured he was dead. When I returned with the skimmer net to get him out, he was standing upright at the bottom of the pool. I fished him out and fetched my wife to take a look. He moved from the center to the edge of the net while I was gone. I took him off the net and moved him near the fence where I have seen lizards like him hanging out. His movements made me think he might survive. I went in the house for five or ten minutes and he was gone when I returned. I took photos of the lizard and wondered if there might be some place on the internet to share my story and photos. A Google search took me to iNaturalist. I joined, posted my data, and soon had a confirmation of my identification.

I was impressed with iNaturalist and wondered if they might like a photo of a snake trying to eat a lizard. Soon after posting the observation, I knew the identification of the snake and a possible identification for the lizard. After that, I posted observations of a couple of animals and some of the more exotic plants I had seen. After having looked at the iNaturalist site for a day or so, it occurred to me that in addition to confirmations of my identifications, I could expect help with identifications and corrections of my mistaken IDs. I spent the rest of April and into May posting mostly flower observations.

A turning point occurred in late April, 2013, when I posted observations for a trip I took to Chain Lakes in July 2008. I got the usual helpful support from iNaturalists belinda and invertboy. However, no matter which reference I consulted, one of the specimens refused to be found. Invertboy managed to identify the plant as Lewisia leeana, a fairly rare plant usually found on the California/Oregon border but with a small disjunct population in eastern Fresno County. On trips into the Woodchuck Creek watershed, I saw hundreds more of these rare plants. I decided it might be fun to map its distribution in the area.

On May 6, 2013, I took my first field trip specifically designed to collect data for iNaturalist. It was very rewarding and I continued to establish relationships with other iNaturalists. I continued to post observations from the past decade and took another field trip on May 20 which turned out to be as fruitful as the earlier trip.

Something else interesting happened at about the same time within the first months of joining. A fellow iNaturalist, microm, suggested that I use the “What Grows Here?” feature of the Calflora database. It was a wonderful resource to help me narrow down some difficult plant identifications. Toward the end of summer 2013, I was astonished to find that I was the only person to have made observations in the Woodchuck Creek watershed, an area of about fifteen square miles. I checked other nearby watersheds and found that many of them were also seldom visited.

Through iNaturalist, I have become motivated to carry out two projects; map the areal extent of the disjunct population of Lewisia leeana in Fresno County and find as many species as possible in the little studied watersheds east of Wishon and Courtright Reservoirs.

Bill Finch
July 2014

Posted on August 8, 2014 09:08 PM by sekihiker