On a recent Saturday, my husband Derrick and I took the kids, Jake (10) and Emma (6) out to explore the woods near our home and to get started with iNaturalist. Did I mention we live near a stunning 115 acre nature sanctuary with a waterfall? A natural choice for our first foray into citizen science…
The weather was just starting to turn colder, so not only did it turn out to be a brisk but beautiful day for a fall hike, we had the trails nearly to ourselves. We ended up doing about a 1.5 mile loop and took a shameful number of photos- around 300! Whatever the kids wanted to photograph, I snapped a quick picture: a leaf, a waterbug, a cool stump, a fallen tree. I rarely do this- I usually try to steer clear of smart phones when we’re out in nature so we can enjoy the experience. And we must have been to this place a hundred times. But today was different. Jake and Emma were on a little bit of a power trip seeing my willingness to take photos of anything and everything and did convince me to take a couple photos of them performing various stunts and feats of strength. They were excited, I was excited, and I was seeing things in a whole new light. Since we were trying to identify species, we were looking at everything much more closely. Even my quiet husband, who had postponed a perfectly good weekend nap to come with us, got in on the act. He’s arguably the most scientific of all of us, a former Missouri Junior Adademy of Science volunteer with a PhD in mathematics and almost ten years of teaching experience to his name. We ended up hiking further than usual and were all in a great mood since we were so focused on looking for interesting plants, birds, and animals.
It may work for you to upload single photos to iNaturalist right away, where you can then look for crowdsourced possible species identifications for your finds. For us, the app was loading slowly off the beaten path and I quickly decided to wait until later to try making our observations in the app. Although hoping for a deer, wild turkey, frog, rabbit, snake, or duck, all of which we’ve seen in the sanctuary before, the animals weren’t very active today, maybe due to the weather. We did see lots of birds, but I learned quickly that even my Pixel 3, decent for a smartphone camera, wasn’t going to cut it to capture a close enough photo of any bird we were likely to see.
All in all, the kids and I came home and made about 15 iNaturalist observations of Missouri plants and fungi. Our favorites so far were these pretty little orange Galerina mushrooms, which iNaturalist has suggested are moss bells, and this red maple bursting with color.
Now that we have our sea legs, I think we’re ready for some serious wildlife expeditions. We’re not quite at Jane Goodall in Gombe level yet, but we all have to start somewhere. Jane tells the story in her book Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder from the World of Plants (Grand Central Publishing 2014) of a tree she used to climb, that she named Beech, and the earthworms she dug up in the garden and tried to take to bed with her until her mother discovered them. These childhood memories strongly influenced her lifelong love of nature, and I know that my children will remember these small victories with a camera phone as we move on to more adventurous territory.
Next, I’ll sit down with the kids and pick a longer-term project or two that we can do from home over the winter whenenever the weather outside is not cooperating. I’m looking at Galaxy Zoo, a long-running space project with more than 50,000 volunteers that actually inspired the Zooniverse site, but need to see if it’s age-appropriate for my youngest. Until next time….
