Hi friends! I’ve been working on something this week that I’ve been wanting for a while: a little push each month to go out and find things I might not ordinarily spot. I’m calling it iNaturalist Bingo.
Each month, iNaturalist Bingo chooses 25 species in your location that are (roughly) in season. Your goal is to observe as many of them as you can! In particular, try to make a full row or column of 5, or make one of the diagonals. iNaturalist Bingo connects with your iNaturalist account, so that observations you make during the month will be automatically checked off.
I’ve really been enjoying keeping my eyes peeled for the things I haven’t yet spotted. Perhaps you’d also have some fun with it? Let me know!
I waited for a while but then the little moving icon on the tab that shows it is loading just stopped. I’m trying again.
Edit: Happened again. It stopped loading and the page is just blank white.
Edit 2: Apparently 4th time is the charm
"This application will be able to:
Create, update, and delete your observations, identifications, and other content on your behalf, and access your hidden coordinates and any other information you can access on the site. "
The page eventually loaded for me, but it is the same bingo card as you have - San Francisco County. I’m not going to see many of those things in January in southern Australia.
Or is this only meant to work on a phone?
It totally isn’t! In fact, the only thing the app needs is your user ID so it can pull the observations list. Unfortunately I don’t think I can request fewer permissions with iNaturalist’s authentication system. I’ll see what I can do though!
[Edit]: Figured it out! The app now only requests “information relevant to signing into a third party service”.
I couldn’t figure out what to do with the change location box that popped up. I couldn’t do anything by clicking on it. I saw the number in the URL so I found the place ID number and changed that in the URL. That worked to change the photos/species but the location box won’t go away and the photos are darkened.
OK, I can successfully change my location, and see lots of things that are around me now. Some of them I have already observed this month, but they are not marked on the bingo card. I clicked on “Auth” to allow it to use my account details, but that didn’t change anything on the bingo card.
It’s working fine for me, other than showing species that was once found in Jan and was a rare find, I see I couldn’t do any line as soe species just not found anywhere near, maybe choosing more common ones would work as a start.
After I authorized now box to type in location shows up. I took a drive down the road to where I knew there were some Stalked Puffball-in-Aspic so I could quickly have an observation to test the functionality. It is totally useless for my bingo card since in one direction I would need a red fox which I have never seen around here (gray foxes show up on my trail cam) and the other direction I would need an Eastern Hercules Beetle (only seen once in my lifetime) and two more fungi that I don’t know where to find. Anyways… I tried refreshing the page and I don’t see a checkmark.
Can you make it choose things that have been seen more than once in that month or even only include things that are research grade? I just looked and saw that the only observation of a Pirate Perch in my location in January was an observation that I made 10 years ago. I don’t even know that my ID is correct though (people who looked at it said the photo was too blurry to tell). I wonder what will happen if I withdraw my ID…
Edit: when I withdrew my pirate perch ID and refreshed the page, I got a totally new card
Edit2: I’m finding more that only had one or two observations for this month and place (and again some of them are mine from previous years)
Play iNaturalist Bingo!
