iNaturalist

★★★★★

iNaturalist is sort of like Pokémon Go for real animals and plants.

It’s a “citizen science” project that asks regular people to look for and report observations of wildlife (and wild plants, fungi, etc), submitting photo, sound or video evidence, wherever you happen to be: Out in the woods, on a farm, on an urban street, in your kitchen where you spot a spider under the sink. The idea is to get people looking everywhere, not just where expected, and crowd-source a map of where a species shows up over time.

For identifying what you’re looking at, there’s image-recognition software that can usually help narrow it down, and other users who might have more expertise than you at telling hummingbirds apart can look at your photo and say, “Oh, that’s definitely an Anna’s hummingbird.”

I got into it before the Covid-19 lockdowns, but ramped up my activity during 2020, when there wasn’t anywhere to go except walking around outside.

Mobile App

The Android app streamlines the basic use case of posting an observation from your phone, and it uses the image-recognition AI to help you narrow it down.

I haven’t used the iPhone app, but I assume it’s similar.

I’ve tried a number of phone-based image editors for cropping and enhancing photos before uploading them, but the only one I’ve found that doesn’t mangle location or time metadata is Image Toolbox.

Perspective

Before iNaturalist: “Wow, that yard is completely overrun with weeds!” (See also: “plant blindness.”)

After iNaturalist: “Wow, that yard is completely overrun with stork’s-bills and mallows! And a bunch of barley over there by the edge…Ooh, what are those tiny yellow flowers…?”

I’ve also gotten a lot better at recognizing the differences among local birds, too. I used to classify them as:

• pigeon
• seagull
• crow
• duck. or maybe goose?
• um, small bird?

Now I can tell pigeons from doves, several types of sparrows from each other and finches, ducks from geese from coots from wigeons, starlings from blackbirds, and more.

Fun Facts on Ferals

• Most of the pigeons we see in cities are classified as feral, descended from domesticated pigeons derived in turn from rock pigeons who live on the sides of sea cliffs. Buildings serve as a nice substitute.
• Southern California has several well-established feral populations of parakeets descended from escaped pets! I’ve seen at least two different types of plumage (yellow faces on the peninsula, red faces in the South Bay), and the ones a few miles further inland sound different from the ones near the coast.
• The Palos Verdes Peninsula has a feral peafowl population that occasionally gets enough out of hand that the local cities trap and relocate a bunch of them. #
• There isn’t a solid difference between a pigeon and a dove. There are just some species we call doves and others we call pigeons.
• Starlings were deliberately introduced to North America in New York by fans of Shakespeare who wanted to bring every bird the Bard ever mentioned across the Atlantic.