Bioblitz Weekend

Last weekend was one of my favorite events of the year:  The annual iNaturalist City Nature Challenge.  The Nature Challenge is a good-natured world-wide competition to find out what region can get the most nature observations in a 4 day period, and since Friday and Monday are work days for me, I spend all weekend out in the field taking photos and downloading observations to my iNaturalist project.  This year I logged over 40,000 steps getting 110 observations of 65 different species of plants, dragonflies, snakes, birds, and butterflies.

My favorite trail is partially flooded once again because of the release from the dam, and the flooded part includes one of the best places to find dragonflies, but I adjusted, with great success.  The dragonflies are just getting started; the Eastern pondhawks, common green darners, plains clubtails and common whitetails are plentiful but I know there's more to come as summer gets closer.  People often tell me they love dragonflies; they're fascinating beauties with their often complex coloring and ethereal looking wings. In nature, however, they are also often downright vicious, especially when they capture a tasty meal- which is often enough another, less fortunate, dragonfly or damselfly.

Of course, what I was really looking for was the snakes.  On Friday night I was fortunate enough to observe this gorgeous broad-banded water snake, and at that moment I knew that it was going to be a great Bioblitz weekend.  It didn't stick around for long, but it was long enough to get a few great snake photos.  During the weekend, I was also able to find two rough greensnakes, a cottonmouth, and a western rat snake.  It was a good snake- observing weekend.

When I first got hooked on iNaturalist in 2014- which seems like such a long time ago, now- I could reliably identify a few birds and plants (northern cardinal, blue jay, robin, and bluebonnets).  Now I can identify much of what I see (with the exception of plants- sometimes the best I can do there is "flowering plant").  I don't always get it right, and sometimes I'm fooled or led astray by wishful thinking; a few weeks ago I was really excited because I thought I'd gotten a new species of dragonfly; it looked similar to a common green darner but the colors were slightly brighter that what I normally observed.  Of course, it ended up being a common green darner (but a really pretty one!).  I've learned so much in five years and I am only getting started.

Every year that I've participated in the City Nature Challenge, I've found at least one "WOW!" observation, and this year was no exception.  As usually is the case, I found it when I was least expecting to find anything in a place I had looked at hundreds of times and seen nothing.  This is probably the cutest observation I have in my iNaturalist project, and it was really difficult to resist the temptation to pick up one of these SUPER CUTE ADORABLE opossums and cuddle it.  Better sense prevailed and I settled for standing a few feet away, gushing to myself about ALL THE CUTE!

What really amazes me is that I was able, in two days, to document 65 different species, some plants but most not, in a nature preserve located in the middle of a huge, extensively developed, metropolitan area.   Wildlife is all around us, whether it's a monarch butterfly passing through on its migration or the rat snake the Dad of No found while cleaning out some vegetation in our backyard (the snake left before I got to see it).