Diario de pisum

Well, I'm officially above 2000 observations. That includes 1800+ from various outings since I first started contributing to iNaturalist, along with 200+ observations from old vacation photos and such. (I'm not done adding old photos, but I stopped for a while because it was hard figuring out geocoordinates for some of these photos that don't already have that data recorded in the metadata.) So assuming 1100+ new observations since my last post about 7 months ago, I'm averaging about 150 new observations/month (or 5 observations/day), down from over 200 observations/month in my first few months.

The decrease is probably mostly due to weather, I think. It's been rainy a lot of days since fall, through winter, and even today has been on the verge of rain all day. I don't mind taking photos occasionally in the rain, but often the flowers close up and animals hide, and it's hard to get shots with the rain and the low light and the wind. And even when the rain stops, the trails are muddy. I don't mind walking through mud in boots, but trails get destroyed faster when you walk through them when muddy, and I try not to destroy them if I can help it.

Anyway, I'm still mostly taking photos in Memorial Park and occasionally in Hermann Park. I tried to go down to Buffalo Bayou Park once or twice, but it's not as enjoyable nowadays with all the different parts of the trails closed due to flood damage.

I remember summer being good for dragonfly observations, and then came the rain and clouds. In October, it started to seem like I wasn't seeing a lot of new stuff. The flowers were winding down and leaves began to wither and fall. So I started mixing things up a bit by looking under logs and then doing night hikes armed with a UV light in November, which was quite enlightening. Starting in December, I started checking out other places, including Brazos Bend SP, Armand Bayou Nature Center, Galveston Island SP, Anahuac NWR, and Brazoria NWR to see more birds and sea life. I even added some polygon-based iNat places for ABNC and GISP so that I could clean up IDs and follow what's going on at those places. (There are some really good photographers at the two NWRs in particular, but also at the other places.) But now that things are greening up and blooming again, I'm mostly doing my observing at parks back in the city, which saves me the long drives.

I'm still finding a lot of new stuff almost every time I go out to look for stuff. Of 40+ observations I made yesterday, more than a handful of them were things that I had never seen before. Today I even requested a taxon to be added for a beetle that I observed. In the last week, I actually requested another new taxon for another person's oak gall, and I flagged a misspelled fungus taxon, and doing that has made me understand even more how this is very much a community-driven platform.

I also realized what a great community is here as I started to old photos from various other locations and found that people were there to identify the local species, and as I put in new bird and shell observations and found lots of people quickly identifying those. That really makes me feel like part of a meaningful collective effort.

In another month or so it'll be the City Nature Challenge (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2019-houston) again, and I'm looking forward to participating in that. But in the meantime, I'll be out when I can, looking for all the new stuff that spring brings!