NR 1010+1020 Phenology – cate bilbe

Hello from the end of the City Nature iNaturalist BioBlitz Challenge! During the last few days, I have explored mostly in and around the UVM campus. I noted many species around Redstone campus, and on Sunday some members of my lab group went on a walk to Redstone quarry which is where I did the majority of my inputs! My experience using iNaturalist was good! It was nice to have a bit of prior experience using the app in NR1010 so it was very intuitive using it this time around. I had about fifteen observations with a total of eight species! My favorite things I spotted were different species of birds because it is so nice to see them after a long winter.

Above is a photo of my lab group on a Sunday walk!

Something that I found particularly interesting about incoming reports from other cities was that almost all of the US cities that were in the top ten participating cities were in Texas. I also found it interesting that these reports were coming from cities you don’t think of as super outdoories, like San Antonio and Dallas. I love how this challenge brought the whole world together around nature!

Phenology walk!

On the snowy, snowy day of Sunday, March 30th, I set out with a small group of friends to do the Phenology walk. Saturday had brought lots of snow so we were trudging through a good few inches of it. We set out around 10:00am, and it was cloudy and vaguely raining.

Since we went early on in the season, we really didn’t see lots of signs of spring in any of the trees. Only one tree had a few buds breaking, there were no new leaves growing, no flowers, and no pollen. All of the trees were basically in the same phenophase, except for the Red Maple #280, which had a good amount of breaking leaf buds.

As someone who has never really experienced a true transition from a real Winter to Spring, something I Iearned from the NPN’s website was that just because there is an early start to the spring doesn’t mean everything will follow just as quickly.

I tried to attach pictures of the trees we saw, but my computer was not letting me. I will keep trying but for photos of what the trees looked like on this day, you can check out my friend Rayna’s blog here: https://blog.uvm.edu/rlherman/ !