City Nature Challenge! 🐛🌿🌎🦆

BioBlitz! Yay! On Saturday, I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time outside making observations for the City Nature Challenge. In the morning, I went for a run through the Burlington Country Club. I didn’t see much wildlife at all though, only one Grey Squirrel and one Canadian Goose, which is pictured below. Later that day, I went for a nice long walk at Red Rocks Park in South Burlington with my friend Molly. It was a really beautiful afternoon and I’m so grateful that I got the chance to hang out in one of my favorite places in the Greater Burlington area. Most of the visual observations I made were of plant species. I surprisingly didn’t see a ton of wildlife at Red Rocks, but I was able to spot some really beautiful plant life and here some cool bird calls. My iNaturalist experience on Saturday was one of the best I’ve had yet. It was really nice to be able to identify flowers and plant species with ease as Molly and I came across them. We spotted lots of Eastern Chipmunks and Grey Squirrels scampering around in the understory. We also found a Pileated Woodpecker going to town on a tree by the overlook, which was really cool to see especially after we’ve been learning so much about them in lecture. It was a real challenge to take good pictures of wildlife when they were camouflaged in their surrounding environment and often being spotted from far away though. I also saw some really beautiful flowers, like purple and white Round-lobed Hepaticas and Dutchman’s Breeches. I really love pine trees, so being in an environment so dominated by pine species like Hemlocks was awesome. I also saw a lot of ferns covering rock faces in the park. iNaturalist identified the fern species shown below as a Polypody Fern. iNaturalist also helped me figure out that one of the other plants I observed was a member of the Trillium genus. We heard a lot of bird calls while at Red Rocks. I wasn’t able to identify them myself, and I haven’t been able to get them to upload to iNaturalist since I saved them as movies, but I put them as videos below. 🙃 Altogether, I identified 9 animal species (Grey Squirrel, Canadian Goose, Eastern Chipmunk, Pileated Woodpecker) and 5 plant species (Round-lobed Hepaticas, Dutchman’s Breeches, Eastern Hemlock, Polypody Fern, Trillium) that particularly stood out to me, but I must have encountered hundreds (if not thousands) more.

I decided to look into how Boston was doing in their City Nature Challenge. It was crazy to see how biodiverse an area that is so heavily urbanized and developed could be. When I looked at their iNaturalist board, more than 12,000 observations had already been made! There were observations made for everything from ferns to crabs to beavers and the top contributor had made 500 observations. I then decided to take a peak at Costa Rica’s progress in their City Nature Challenge and was blown away. At the time I checked, there were nearly 1,300,000 observations made of almost 48,000 species. It’s wild to see how the endimicity and biodiversity of the tropics is reflected so clearly in the City Nature Challenge. Costa Rica’s City Nature Challenge also had over 55,000 participants, which was still really inspiring. This was a really cool event to be able to participate in, and I’m really looking forward to seeing the nature clocks that are developed using the data that citizen science collected!