Jseattle gets around on iNaturalist

I will forever argue that finding people to learn with will always be better than learning only on your own. My recent escapades as a lifelong learner have had me diving deep into diverse topics like wooden spoon carving and contributing to the Washington Bee Atlas, where I started out “on my own.” Many people raised in the United State might have been subliminally led to believe that being “self-taught” is something to be deeply proud of. Certainly it can be. But this bootstrapping is just another way of saying you put in a lot of lonely hours into something. I took leaps and bounds in both these nerdy pursuits when I finally met some folks IRL – plus it was way more fun.

That being said, you don’t always have a bee expert at your side and we live in a brave new world of naturalist resources, often on our phones. With summer approaching, some of us spend more time outside and might even have some extra free time to ogle flora and fauna. It might seem ironic that in the days of disconnection from nature and an alarming decline of biodiversity worldwide, that we have more natural history apps than ever. But really it is because of this drifting away that people have developed said resources – we might need to get away from our phones more but we also might as well use them for good.

I might be willing to lug about a textbook called “The Solitary Bees,” but I wouldn’t recommend it. Your pocket computer has so much to offer and much of it is free. Here are three apps we should all have, that will make your summer more interesting, and might tell you what plants, bugs, and birds are about while sunning yourself at Cal Anderson.

iNaturalist

The last time I wrote about apps for nature, I made an egregious error and left iNaturalist out. Now I use it almost every day. Part organism identifier, part biodiversity data crowdsourcer, this app and accompanying website can aid your learning about the visible species all around – from insects to birds, from lichen to plants. Here’s the basics: you take a photo with the app, which automatically records the location and date, the AI spins away and makes a suggestion based on other IDs in the system, and you pick  that ID (or if you know better, another), and post your sighting.

From there your observation is out into the world and with luck, some knowledgeable folks will help verify your record. Sometimes they just concur, sometimes they get more specific (“It’s this subspecies of Western Fence Lizard because of the blue around the anus”), or sometimes set the records straight (“No, that’s a pet dog, not a wolf.”). According to iNaturalist, when passing a certain threshold of agreed upon IDs they call “research grade” these verification are 95% accurate, which is pretty amazing when it might be a bad photo snapped by a phone, even with common species considered.

The images you put on iNaturalist while walking the dog are now part of a greater network of biodiversity data accessible to other learners and even researchers. Plus it’s fun as hell and addictive. Seek is the gamified app version of iNaturalist, an attempt to get kids large and small into nature by creating challenges and badges for adding records. Personally I don’t need the encouragement but my partner really loves using Seek.

You can dive deep into iNaturalist and use it to find out when certain plants might be blooming or start to learn a new obscure group of animals, like I did with bees. The best part is that it’s free, easy to use, and is run by a small non-profit dedicated to nature and data. Use it on your next walk around the Hill – it works just as well on cultivated plants as wild ones.

Merlin

I have talked extensively about eBird on Pikes/Pines – after I am always birding and want a place to record my bird sightings and track what other birds are being reported. Just like iNaturalist, my eBird data aggregates into a larger, more helpful whole that researchers can use to better understand and protect the natural world. Plus because it’s from Cornell Lab of Ornithology, there’s just so much to learn there. But have you met Merlin?

Merlin, also by Cornell, is a free app that helps ID the birds you are seeing and hearing. Drop in a photo you took and Merlin will not only offer ID suggestions, but share info about that bird, tell you how common it is (based on eBird data), and more. Hear a bird but don’t recognize it? Pull out Merlin and start recording – not only will the app show you what birds are vocalizing within your phone’s mic range, it will highlight those birds live along with a sonogram. See a bird but didn’t get a photo? Walk down a simple key and get a list of suggestions based on your observation (e.g. size, color, behavior, your location, and time of year). I may still use my Sibley app as a pocket field guide, but Merlin is close to having it beat, especially if I am learning new birds.

Unlike eBird and iNaturalist, which have a website backend for the data nerds – Merlin lives purely in the app ecosystems and only works on iOS or Android systems. As I alluded to, it uses eBird data to help refine your queries and there are other tie-ins allowing you to keep track of the birds you’ve seen and look at what’s been seen nearby. I have used Merlin to get quite a few folks into learning local birds, particularly by ear, and it’s an awesome tool for traveling to new places because you can download a regional pack and use it without service (that being said, on a recent trip to South Africa the bird recording feature did not work at all but hey, I can’t believe Merlin even exists so I am not complaining). Go download Merlin and play around with it next time you hear some birds singing.

Washington Wildflower App

I hesitate to include this app because it is older, was on my list in the past, and it’s not free. However, at a cheap one time cost of $9.99, less than the book it shares photos with (Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest), it is arguably more useful because it doesn’t take up any extra space in your backpack. Plus, it’s a local affair: created by the University of Washington Herbarium, the authors of the book above, and an app developer out of Montana. If you are at all interested in botany in our region, even if you don’t leave the hill but want to learn about invasive plants, it is an excellent resource.

Most of the info on the app can be gathered on the Herbarium website and through other sources, but this nice bundle travels to locations without service and helps narrow down your choices without being an expert. Botanists are the champions of dichotomous keys, a system of narrowing down your options by saying “is it this or that? Ok, now does it have x or y?” and so on until you had an ID. Basically, like Merlin, you give it some info (color, region of Washington, foliage type, habitat) and it gives you some options of what the plant in question could be.

Each plant in the app has its own entry with photos and info. This isn’t extensive, but it’s enough to narrow your ID options, learn a little bit, and even see where else in Washington the species should occur and has been collected. I use it all the time, both to check my knowledge and to continue to learn. I’ve paid more for a crappy beer at a Sounders Game and I get frequent joy from it, whereas the beer just made me need to pee.

Of course these are just three of my favorites and there are dozens of websites devoted to becoming a better naturalist or learning local species. If you don’t want to use iNaturalist, Google Lens isn’t a bad alternative though it doesn’t do any good for the world and has no real information to share with you beyond diving through links. If you don’t want to pay for apps, bookmark the UW Herbarium website but it probably won’t load during your next hike in the Cascades. There’s Bugguide for invertebrates and Birdweb is good for local bird knowledge. The list goes on.

When Merlin just came out and likewise, when I have used iNaturalist with non-naturalist friends, they often suggest these apps might be somehow intellectually dishonest. Like they are cheating. First, who cares? Second, if these apps are getting people to pay attention, even through their phone, that’s a win. No biologists are losing their jobs because of Merlin and the data that allows iNaturalist to make ID suggestions is literally based on what we’ve fed the system. Both help document species both common and rare. No one comes away less interested in nature as a result of their use.

So use these apps. Go frolic and peer at tiny things. Have a glorious summer. Let me know what you find.

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