I had a lot of fun participating in the City Nature Challenge over the weekend. I wasn’t planning on doing as much birding as I did, but when they said it was competitive, I knew I had to give it everything. On Friday I spent my morning at Centennial Woods and on Saturday I recorded some species while volunteering at the Spectacular Nature Celebration in the Intervale. On Sunday I spent the morning at Ethan Allen Homestead, then biked down to the mouth of the Winooski, and on Monday I tried to get just a few more species at Centennial Woods.
There was a bit of a learning curve to using iNaturalist, not to mention it burned through my phone battery, but overall it was a really intuitive app and the identification suggestion really helped with learning a lot of plant species.
The Challenge was filled with great wildlife encounters. I spent a lot of time watching swamp sparrows at Ethan Allen Homestead and was really happy with some of the pictures I got.
Also at Ethan Allen Homestead, there was a pit that they had built for garter snakes to hibernate and I was able to get some great up-close looks as they were emerging from their dormancy.
Here are some other pictures taken during the City Nature Challenge.
I was impressed with how many species some cities were able to identify, but not surprised. Obviously with Cape Town having such great biodiversity, it makes sense they would come in first, but for the cities that have been doing this event for a while, its not hard to get lots of people excited about being involved. I’m sure, after a couple years, Burlington will be right up there with the big guns.