Three Days In!
Three days into the City Nature Challenge, at 00:01 on Monday, April 30, DC metro is in 4th place for number of observations, 8th for species, and 5th for observers. Expect those ranks to go down somewhat as cities west of our time zone finish their uploads from today, but wow! What a day! These great ranks reflect our 14,616 observations, 1452 species, and 675 observers. Common blue violet has edged out garlic mustard for the moment with 157 observations over 150, but the species in the top 10 remain similar to yesterday and the day before. The bald eagle count is up to 19.
Today was cool, mostly sunny but quite breezy, which made it difficult to focus the camera on plants as they swayed in the wind. A huge shout-out goes to the Virginia Master Naturalists, who hosted dozens of events over the last three days, with more to come tomorrow, and who got lots of new iNaturalists into the field! Special thanks go to @matt-ratcliffe for keeping us straight about skinks and other herps and to the always inspiring @carrieseltzer for yesterday’s great tip on how to find “what’s missing” in iNat—it sent me out today in search of several specific things and other people as well, I’m sure, since the missing species lists got a lot smaller today.
There’s one more day to make observations. Many of us are going back to work tomorrow, but consider taking a quick break at lunch to check out an area near your workplace that you might not have iNaturalized before. It’s amazing what shows up when you look closely at a familiar area--today I found a tiny plant that I had never seen before right in my neighborhood park, in a spot I have walked over hundreds of times. I’m looking forward to someone here helping me to identify it! And if you get the urge after dark tomorrow night to do just one or two more observations, try what some of us did at 12:01 on Friday morning—find a creepy crawly in your garage or basement, or go outside and take a sound recording of a night bird! Anything taken before midnight tomorrow counts.
More on identification—there are four species identification parties, the first tomorrow night at the Museum of Natural History, with others at Merrimac Farm, Blandy Experimental Farm, and in Arlington. See https://citynaturechallengedc.wordpress.com/events/ for details and join one if you can!
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Thanks for the write-up and the shout out! Hoping to get a few more observations from today to wrap the challenge up.
I did every thing I possibly could to beat NYC! Hopefully our numbers hold!
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