For my addition to the City Nature Challenge BioBlitz, I went down to the Redstone Quarry, and also stopped to observe some trees along the way. I first found a small red maple, and I thought the leaves were very cute. I also found an Eastern White Pine along the road to the Quarry.
One of the most interesting things to me while participating in the BioBlitz was that I found some of my tree and shrub ID’s to be completely wrong, and that is totally okay! It reminded me that I am still learning and always have more to get to know and experience. I found that what I thought was Eastern Hemlock is actually a type of Juniper.
The most memorable moment I had by far was finding a large grouping of wild chives. I went out to the Quarry with my friend that day and she asked what the chives were. Before she mentioned it, I had never noticed them before. I told her I believed they were chives, then the iNaturalist app also recognized them as that. Because of my classification along with the app’s she picked on and ate it, and turns out they were chives!
Overall, I was a big fan of using iNaturalist. I feel like it made me more comfortable and confident in the classifications that I was making as I was exploring the native species. I found the species we were finding really interesting compared to the ones coming from other cities. For example, my hometown of Boston, Massachusetts had a lot of similar species, but Hong Kong had a lot more variety and had very little overlap with the species that were found in Burlington, Vermont.