City Nature Challenge- May 4th, 2021
I was able to participate in this years BioBlitz by primarily exploring the Intervale center. On Saturday, May 1st I participated in the Spectacular Nature Day at the Intervale. This was such a fun, memorable experience for me, and it made me feel so lucky to be apart of the Rubenstein School, as well as the Burlington/Winooski community. During this event I was able to plant ostrich ferns, observe birds, identify wildflowers and trees, as well as spending my day outside enjoying the sun. I also really enjoyed using iNaturalist, an app I had never really used before, but was very easy to learn and very fun to experiment with. I will definitely be using iNaturalist in the future to identify species and take along with me on hikes and field studies.
One of my favorite species to identify this weekend was the Red Deadnettle. Alicia Daniel from Burlington Wildways joined us for a portion of the Spectacular Day, and was teaching us about identifying wildflowers. We worked through her key to try to identify this flower, but had a hard time figuring out what it was. As soon as We logged it into iNaturalist we got a clear answer, and it was incredibly cool to see how easy and fun it is to use iNaturalist. We also had a tricky time trying to identify a garlic mustard that was flowering (not pictured), and we all laughed when we logged it into iNaturalist and realized it was a species that we had been talking about and observing all day long.
When looking at reports from other cities across the globe, it was easy to see the differences in species types in each location. For example, when looking at Ecuador there were lots of species I had never even heard of before, such as the Stilt-legged Flies and the Hanging Lobster Claw Heliconia. When looking a little bit closer to home in New Hampshire, I was able to see more recognizable species such as the Broadleaf Cattail and the Common Serviceberry. I found it super interesting to look at the different locations participating in the City Nature Challenge, proving to me that there are so many different species in so many locations around the World.