Last Saturday, 4/30, my friends from my lab, Bella and Sam, and I went down to the Burlington Intervale to check out part of the City Nature Celebration! Bella’s recurring phenology spot happens to be far in the back of the trails behind the Intervale, so we took a nice, long walk through the area while using iNaturalist the whole way. Her phenology spot is along the Winooski River, and we posted up in the area and walked around to try and identify bird calls and trees by just their trunks. We arrived later in the day around 1:30, so there weren’t that many other people around, but it was lovely to see people grouped off, their hands in the soil, learning from one another.
Bella’s phenology spot
We encountered numerous species in and around the Intervale on our walk. One of the most exciting things that we saw were consistent swarms of Honey Bees feeding off the pollen of recently blooming flowers. I don’t think I had seen a bee for months during the brutal Vermont winter, so it was wonderful to see the pollinators out and about.
We also came by numerous new fiddle-heads poking up through the ground. The small leaves of maples and oaks were just started to emerge from their buds, and we were able to see the tiny new life peeking out! This was so wonderful for me to see because in my hometown, new life starts blooming several weeks before it does in Vermont, and I was definitely ready for the green landscape to come back to life. Furthermore, we found other new flowers poking up from the ground, specifically an abundance of white, daisy-looking flowers that iNaturalist identified to be Bloodroot.
My overall experience using iNaturalist was a relatively positive one. While I had downloaded the app earlier this year for a NR 1 lab, I needed a refresher on how to use it. I will say that it was confusing to join different groups within the overall City Nature Challenge, and I had a hard time at first figuring out where we were supposed to upload observations. Once a quick refresher, however, I was able to take advantage of the identification tool on iNaturalist, which ended up being very helpful on our walk and as I continued my BioBlitz challenge in my own, personal phenology spot in Centennial Woods. It was also incredibly helpful to be able to it inset pictures that we had taken on our walk into iNaturalist later on, and have it still identify the species for us, which I did with almost all the pictures I had snapped on Saturday. My complaint about iNaturalist would be the quality of its identification tool, because there was generally about a 60% chance that a picture I snapped would be accurately identified, and it was very difficult to use the app to identify bird calls.
Furthermore, it was awesome to be able to see the observations from environmental enthusiasts not just in the Vermont area! A few of the observations that were fascinating to me were aquatic invertebrates and species that I saw in the hundreds of thousands observations on the City Nature Challenge 2022 iNaturalist page. There were several starfish and types of coral that I was examining through other people’s observations which was super cool because we had no such species to observe in the areas of Burlington we visited.
the bark of Cottonwoods
Tune back in tomorrow for my final visit to my phenology spot!
-Dani 🙂