Nature at Home
A couple weekends ago I participated in a friendly competition with members of the unofficial iNaturalist Discord server to see who could find the most species only on their own property. I really enjoyed the challenge of trying to find new species while restricted to a suburban yard and I think I did pretty well! Most of the plants had not started coming up yet, and many of these species could be seen on a warm day in the middle of the winter. I'm curious how many more species I could get in the summer with the use of a moth light etc.
Thanks to many identifiers I have over 85 leaves for the weekend, so in addition to 16 bird species I heard and noted on eBird I recorded over 100 species. You can see my observations from the challenge here and the project in general here: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/inaturalist-discord-march-weekendblitz-2020
The highlights for me were getting:
- At least 5 species of millipedes
- At least 4 species of isopods
- 4 species of slugs
- A huge (relatively speaking) soil centipede that I'd never seen before
- Two flatworms
- A pseudoscorpion
Thank you to the Discord server mods for organizing this and to everyone else who participated, particularly @erininmd and @tammym4748 for keeping the competition up!