Go team Hartford/NewHaven!!

Congratulations to everyone on another day that far exceeded our expectations! When I set a goal for 65 observers today, I definitely underestimated how many more people would be participating on a weekend day - we had DOUBLE the number of observers as yesterday!

We also surpassed our goal of reaching 400 species observed today - as of midnight, we had 461 species! Thank you to @bafinnan and @kellyfuerstenberg for adding our project's first fishes, @scmayo for finding us a chipmunk, and @cecilydyer for adding our first frog!

We'd love to hear from you all about how you found out about the project - we assume that some folks are just regular iNaturalist users who happened to make observations this weekend, but we were also very excited to see that observations are way up from where they were this same weekend last year! So the word must be spreading. Please comment to let us know how you learned about the City Nature Challenge!

Before I get into some pictures from today, I wanted to point out some opportunities to capture more species:

• We could still really use some pictures of mollusks, seaweeds, and other shoreline creatures in addition to the wonderful variety of birds we're capturing
• It rained this evening, so we may have a chance at observing some more mushrooms! Remember that with mushrooms, it is often necessary to have pictures not just from the top, but also the underside of the specimen
• Keep an eye out for spiders - there's lots of arachnids not yet captured in our project!

Chase (@Hexagonaria) and I took a walk today at Sleeping Giant State Park, and were excited to add another kingdom to our project when we observed some slime molds! We'll need help identifying them - please take a look if you have any slime mold expertise:

There are way too many incredible pictures to share here, but here are a few that I was excited to see today:

This breathtaking photo of a Great Egret, captured with its stunning green mating lores by @arachphotobia:

This adorable Northern Parula warbler, captured mid-migration by @abbyks:

The wonderfully weird Juniper Apple Rust fungus - a bane of apple growers, but such a cool organism! (photographed by @scmayo)

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Some lovely Bird's Foot Violets, photographed by @jmmusser:

And I know this post is heavy on the birds, but I loved this photo of some jewel-toned Tree Swallows by @codylimber:

Keep up the amazing work everyone, we are so grateful to you for making this first CNC Hartford/New Haven a success!

Posted on April 28, 2024 05:05 AM by chiforager