If you liked that map you’ll probably like this as well:
http://oak.conncoll.edu:8080/notabletrees/
If you find any notable trees that aren’t already documented, you can contact them and submit your own findings. I found them to be responsive within a week or so.
Winter seems more difficult with each passing year. The aging is not viably stoppable, and I’m short on coping techniques.
Therefore I have a stash of newly arrived, unread gardening catalogs waiting for the snowed in season; I have no plan but wishing. I have my uncovered windows full of woods and bird feeders. My freezer will be stocked by then, the cupboards, too. I can’t always get down the road to the store in winter. I will crochet and knit. And if the internet gets here, I will ID.
Mostly I will daydream of spring, and watch the maple buds. That’s my most reliable sign.
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Bark, buds, persistent fruits, seeds, withered forbs, grasses, etc. Even in the North these can be found, and the identification challenges are time consuming for sure.
Great time to study up and identify things for other folks, too.
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That’s awesome. I’m in California too and I’ve been keeping my daily iNat streak going for a few years now.1370 days to be exact. Going along with my 1736 day streak on eBird. It is awesome to live in a place that doesn’t going into hardcore dormancy at any point during the year.
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Going through my dynamic life list, I find quite a few observations that have sat at family or similarly wide IDs for a long time, sometimes years. I’m not going to wait around any longer for “experts” or “specialists” to get to them. It’s time to do some deep dives and see what kind of headway I can make.
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Not a terrible amount to be done in the UK for me and even now there is little in the way of my preferred species ( mostly inverts and other random stuff I find). Most of the moths have died out by now apart from a small number of winter species which I almost never catch with my moth trap and a lot of the misc other inverts which I haven’t observed yet have also died out by now. Might visit Slimbridge Wetland Centre around late November- early December to see some birds I don’t normally find but for now it’s feebly trying to find new mushrooms ( which I’m hopeless at telling apart), lichens and the odd log dwelling invert to boost my species count up by a few. Might also take out my dip net in the hopes of catching some new fish species ( though I should be even more careful not to fall in like I did around mid spring with the river Stour).
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This time of year (November), as the days get shorter and colder, I often think it might be a good thing to be able to hibernate until the vernal equinox. But, somehow, I slog through the cold months, which really aren’t that cold in my area of the Southwest US. Winter birds keep my interest up. Today I saw my first wintering Bald Eagle, a late-season Osprey catching fish, and a Common Loon (wintering or migrating through) which isn’t so common here. So it’s all good.
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I identify the backlog of pickled insects from the summer when the evenings were too short to keep up with the collections. Then the records need putting on the computer.
For new records at this time of year, you can always find water beetles if there isn’t a layer of ice, which there rarely is these days in Wales. If there is any sun, there will be flies basking on tree trunks and fence posts, or coming to lit windows at night.
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I know how you feel – I could get on board with a hibernation period from, say, late October (when the ivy bees are finished for the year) to late February (when the fuzzy red mason bees start appearing).
It’s not the cold (the winters here in central Germany are relatively mild) as much as the shortness of the winter days at 51°N. I’ve gotten into the habit of making a detour to look for arthropods in one or another of the local green spaces on my way home from work, and this doesn’t work very well when it is already starting to get dark by early afternoon.
Nonetheless, I apparently managed to see over 200 species between late October and late February last year, including 100 species in December and January. (At the moment this seems quite astonishing, particularly given that last winter my photos were taken exclusively using a cell phone camera.)
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Yes, it’s the shortage of daylight more than the cold that can drag me down and reduce my motivation. Although I live at about 35 degrees North latitude, so I shouldn’t complain. I don’t think I have Seasonal Affective Disorder, which I’m sure is a real thing, but the extra darkness and low angle of the sun can be depressing along about late December and into January. On the plus side, the low sun angle can make for some really good photos!
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Austria wasn’t on the itinerary - we went Budapest - Esztergom/Sturovo - Prague. The entire trip was only 3 weeks. I’d like to go to Austria someday, I’ve never been there yet.
I try to document every bird species that visits my feeder. Some years, I piggyback Project Feederwatch and report what I’m seeing to Cornell.
I also recently started going through iNat observations of various insect orders that have aquatic nymph or larval stages like odonata, ephemeroptera, tricoptera, etc. to annotate the juvenile observations so I can pull them into a project. I started with damselflies. I started with over 7000 pages (w 30 obs/page) and am down to about 6700.
My back-of-envelope math suggests it will take me over 100 hours to finish just this one suborder. If you are bored, I would welcome a little help. Hit me up if you want more info.
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Along with the shorter days, the dry season ~finally~ seems to be ending here. The dry heat of summer, for me, is more of a deterrent to observations than the cool, darker days and rain of winter. Sill, I feel blessed, in This temperate climate, there is always something to observe and think about. The coastal hills configuration provides many differing habitats to explore from tidepools and bay lands to hillside chapparral and mountain forests. We’ve only had 2 rains so far, but this will soon bring back some plants, fungi, amphibians, and some migrating birds. During the winter, I expect to see fewer arthropods and reptiles.
I am sorry to say, my immediate neighborhood is poised to undergo some more high-density developments, so I’d better get out and observe the winter diversity as it still exists.
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Here in Portugal winter is a great season for seagulls (lots of migrants passing/stopping by, and if there are storms many high sea species will come to shore). In addition, for a ring-reading addict like me, it is definetly the best season to register colour-rings.
In addition, late autumn and winter are also great seasons for mushrooms (and all the “headaches” one gets trying to properly ID them)
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Last winter I occupied myself by having a terrible chest infection. This year I’m hoping to try something different.
I’ve got a plan to improve the wildlife value of my garden and I’ve got a big pile of natural stone that I’ve collected from local building sites that needs to be stacked into a rough wall with planting pockets, dew pools and basking spots for the lizards.
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I love lichens! Some look even more vibrant in the wintertime than in the summer.
Ooh, how is that done?
That’s the first video I’ve found:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dSbXvrh4_8A
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For a few lichen UV light can also help. I loved finding this one then show the effect to people: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/147583514
Left picture is what it looks like normally, often has the same color as bark and is almost invisible. Shine UV light on it and it starts glowing in a bright yellow, even in daylight!
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On iNaturalist : ID and curate taxa.
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I haven’t given it much thought, but I spontaneously came up with two things to do in autumn/winter in regards to iNaturalist:
- I realized I didn’t know much about the plants right in the streets surrounding my house. So I made observations of these plants, and made them findable by describing them as Learning the weeds on my streets.
- I started inspecting a random tree once or a couple of days in a row, usually before dawn or after dusk, preferably with my smartphone and camera so I have decent lighting. Interesting to see what lives there!
I aim to figure out a proper workflow for my photos too. Now I store, crop and label them quite unorganized. I know the resources to figure this out, so the orientation phase is finished. I just haven’t found it important enough to actually do.
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