Happy Spring Volunteers!

We hope you are enjoying the increasing sunshine! We are very excited at the observations coming in! April brings the end of the breeding season for many of our common species. However, we are still in the breeding window for Pacific tree frogs and the breeding season has just begun for western toads and American bullfrogs. And there will still be plenty of tadpoles and larvae to see!

We would like to pass on a request from our partners at the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife (WDFW), Dr. Max Lambert. Dr. Lambert is the Aquatic Research Section Manager of the Science Division and Habitat Program of WDFW. If you see any turtles at your ponds, please upload photos of them to iNaturalist. Dr. Lambert is interested in collecting local turtle observations on iNaturalist and we can help in that endeavor! (Note - These photos are not a part of our project, and should not be uploaded to the Amphibians of Washington project.) In our King and Snohomish counties area, the turtles you are most likely to see are non-native to our region - the pond (or red-eared) slider (Trachemys scripta) (see http://slatermuseum.blogspot.com/2012/07/pacific-northwest-turtles.html)

If you want to meet Dr. Lambert over Zoom, he will be joining us for our next Continuing Education Discussion on April 15th at 5:30 to talk about his work and answer your questions! Contact wpzmonitoring1@gmail.com for the link.

Also, we encourage you to join us and participate in City Nature Challenge 2021! Any observations made in all of Snohomish, King and Pierce counties during Friday, April 30 - Monday, May 3 and posted to iNat by Sunday, May 9 will count towards our total observations! So, if your monitoring visit falls during that weekend, please try to post your observations within that next week! And/or make sure to post observations that weekend whatever you are up to outdoors! This year we’re trying to “fill in the gaps” and get some observations in locations we don’t typically get them (you can explore the Seattle-Tacoma CNC 2020 project to see where those gaps are).

You can join the 2021 Seattle-Tacoma City Nature Challenge here (but you don’t need to join for your observations to be included!): https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2021-seattle-tacoma-metropolitan-area

You can explore 2020 Seattle-Tacoma City Nature Challenge observations here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2020-seattle-tacoma-metropolitan-area

You can learn more about the global event (over 200 cities participating!) here: https://citynaturechallenge.org

Thanks for your monitoring efforts this spring!!

Cheers,
WPZ Amphibian Monitoring Team