Welcome to my first Blog post of the year! I can't wait to share some updates from this new butterfly season with you. In the meantime, here's information about a presentation I am giving in April on how iNaturalist.org has transformed my experience of butterfly watching and study, and how it can do the same for you! I plan a blog post on the same topic soon, but in the meantime, I hope you can attend in-person or join this presentation by Zoom.
Here are the event details:
April 12, 2023, 7:00 p.m.
Campbell Senior Center, Great Hall
155 High St, Eugene, OR 97401
For more information: butterfliesoforegon@gmail.com
To view the presentation remotely, sign up for the live Zoom feed by emailing your name and the presentation title to: scottnalison@live.com
Are you looking forward to the coming season of wildflowers and butterflies? Dreaming about what butterflies you’d love to see this year? Are you studying up on those hard-to-identify butterfly species? Planning some butterfly watching outings? Are you hoping to learn about new places to watch butterflies? Great! Do you want to find out how to inject more learning and enjoyment into your appreciation of butterflies? Read on fellow nature lovers!
Neil Björklund, author of Finding Lane County Butterflies, co-founder of NABA Oregon, and creator of www.butterfliesoforegon.com will share how he stumbled into iNaturalist.org, and how it now enhances and expands the learning and enjoyment in the field. Over 30 years of watching, photographing and documenting, and teaching about butterflies in Oregon, Neil has seen many helpful changes, but he still longed for a way to share information with other butterfliers, and to learn from their observations. Now it’s here!
iNaturalist.org, or iNat, as some affectionately call it, has become one of the world’s largest collections of citizen science and photo-documented sightings of wild, living organisms. It has grown rapidly in recent years, and with over 22,000 butterfly sightings now recorded in Oregon, it holds a treasure trove of information you can use to enhance your nature passions!
iNat has radically enhanced the nature experiences of thousands of Oregonians, and you may be next! You can practice your ID skills, discover locations near you to watch butterflies, see what other people are finding and where, focus on the most common species or the most rare, find out how you can make important contributions to science, and even see how you rank compared to other butterfly watchers, if you’re into that sort of thing. Its all there on iNat, and its all free.
Neil will demonstrate all this live on iNat before your very eyes! And of course you’ll be seeing many of Neil’s fabulous butterfly photos and hearing his stories from the field! Get your butterfly season rolling with Neil Björklund and NABA Oregon!
Here's a portal with my recent sightings on iNat, just to give you an appetizer: