Happy (belated) Earth week! I unfortunately was ill on Saturday and recovering on Sunday, so this comes on the Monday after Earth Week.
Here is Centennial Woods– I spent about two hours in this little urban forest today. I breathed in its air, I soaked my feet in the stream because I’m stupid, and I left my skin on some log there (I skinned my knee).
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The water in my shoes squishes around my mismatched socks when I move my phone around to pick up bird calls. So far the only bird I’ve seen was a singular House Finch and some Crows and I want to see something interesting. The Ring-Billed Gull that I had a screaming match with the day before cannot be the best thing to come out of this experience.
Finally, my phone picks up a couple Different Birds– Blue Jay, Black-Capped Chickadee, and the Brown Creeper. I grin a bit as I finish climbing up a hill, some song about being a badass playing in my ear. It’s really cliche, but I’ve never heard of a Creeper before. They’re really cute to be honest– not quite as good as Cedar Waxwings, my favorite bird, but still adorable.
I was kind of hoping to see the Red-bellied Woodpecker I saw Eclipse weekend again, but alas, I leave the woods woodless but waterlogged.
The trees were in bloom– Sugar Maple, American Beech, and Paper Birch are all sending out and opening green buds in Centennial. Ferns have started to regrow too, but not much really changed in fauna since I was here three weeks ago. A few gnats and mosquitos buzz around me while I’m singing along to a song in my headphones, but the world is mostly quiet. No amphibians to be seen, no small mammals, just a few bugs, bird calls, and me.
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I’m not really good with technology, so iNaturalist does not come easy to me. I don’t like posting there, even if it is pretty straightforward– I get overwhelmed by all the possible species I see and distracted by other observations. So, despite loving citizen science, I don’t like utilizing the app for my own observations.
However, I think its super cool to see all the countries working in the Bioblitz– most of the observations are of plants and birds (with the Western Honeybee also coming in forth– woo!). American Robin, Mallard, and Canada Goose were the most common in the Americas– which makes sense with how widespread they are.
Obviously, plants make sense being the most observed (they aren’t as flighty as birds or as skitty as mammals) and backyard plants are the most common, but I would still have expected more mammals to show up and they didn’t (I really only saw deer and squirrels– I expected more chipmunks).
Other than that, I think this was just a cool event and I look forward to it again next year!
Until next time!
