Monday 23 April 2018

Long Point Area - Spring has Arrived!

Well today was as spring-like a day as you could wish for after such a crappy April!  I am happy to see most of the snow is gone from Fergus!

Today I was down in the Long Point area for work and took some time to swing by the park to see what birds were around.  I had many 'First of Year' (FOY) birds.  It was great to see some warblers.  I had Yellow-rumped, Pine and a single Palm Warbler at the provincial park.  Below are a few shots of what I saw today.

Brown Thrasher

Yellow-rumped Warbler

Cooper's Hawk

Eastern Towhee

Eastern Phoebe

Hermit Thrush
I am excited for migration and feel that the big push of migrants is so close I can taste it.  I will be at Pelee this year from May 5-12 this year.  What are your spring plans?

Tuesday 17 April 2018

iNaturalist - I'm hooked!

I decided to give iNaturalist a try after hearing about it from lots of other naturalist folks in Ontario, and I'm really enjoying it so far!  For those of you who don't know what iNaturalist is, it is a place to log observations of any type of plant or wildlife that you come across!  Data from iNaturalist is being harvested by various organizations such as the Natural Heritage Information Centre, so it is a great way to ensure that the data you are collecting doesn't go to waste!  I plan on using it for all of my non-bird observations, as I use ebird exclusively for logging bird sightings.

After posting an observation, other naturalists will verify your observation until it eventually gets to "Research Grade" level, meaning it has been vetted by enough people to considered verified more or less.

You can check out the website here and sign up!

https://www.inaturalist.org/home

Here are some of my favourite observations so far:

The nice thing about iNaturalist is that it is still really growing so you have the chance to feel like a pioneer, for example, this observation below of Bombus balteatus of mine in the Beartooth Wilderness is only the second in the continental U.S as far as I can tell!

Green Basilisk Lizard in Costa Rica

Brown-throated Three-toed Sloth in Costa Rica

The amazing thing about this program is how quick people are to verify your observations!  It is a really fun way share what you have seen, I encourage you to join!  It is particularly fun while we wait for spring to start here, since you can log all your old observations from past outings that is just sitting on your computer!