susanhewitt's Journal
The four days of the observation part of the City Nature Challenge 2019 are over. Now we are working on trying to identify as much as we can.
There are always more people who make observations than there are people doing identifications, but we will see how much we can get done in one week.
Hey folks, if you have any observations from the City Nature Challenge days that are not uploaded yet, please upload them tonight or early tomorrow morning.
And if there is any ID-ing that you can do, for yourself, or for others, please do so within the same time frame.
The whole event is over tomorrow morning at 9 am.
Yay NYC!
Thank you to everyone who made observations during the City Nature Challenge. New York City did very well, coming in 12th in the world. That is remarkable considering we were the highest-ranked city to be this far north, and therefore still very much in spring.
We also had the hardest-working observers, who averaged the most number of observations per person of any city in the top 12.
We made nearly 4000 more observations than we did during last years event, even though we actually had fewer observers than last year.
We found 146 species that had never previously been recorded anywhere on iNaturalist.
For the 14 cities that are in our size category, we were #1 in terms of number of observations and number of species, ahead of Bristol and Bath City Region, Liverpool City region, Calgary and Barcelona.
So thanks again to everyone!
Several people got into the swing of using iNaturalist over the last few weeks within our beautiful park as it moves into full spring/late spring. The park looks absolutely gorgeous... and that is because it is absolutely gorgeous!
I hope everyone is enjoying using iNaturalist (iNat). If you have any questions, always feel free to ask me. On any observation page you can just write in a comment @susanhewitt, and I should automatically be notified. Or, if you know my regular email address, please go ahead and email me.
In recent weeks in our lovely park, there were two early morning sightings of an extremely small, mild, well-behaved and totally harmless native species, DeKay's Brownsnake. The entire park staff should be proud to know that Carl Schurz Park serves as home to this species, because it is an indicator of really excellent habitat quality! Very few Manhattan parks have this species; it has not been recorded so far in Central Park. This cute little reptile eats slugs and snails, and therefore is the gardener's friend.
Here is a picture of a nice one from Illinois:
This spring I was excited to find two species of gall on a group of Boxelder Maple saplings on the edge of the Freshwater Wetland in Randalls Island, Manhattan, NYC.
On the Boxelder Maple there, the most common gall (extremely common this spring!) is the "Box Elder Pouch Gall Mite" (caused by mites). The mites create galls that look like little nodules on the upper leaf surface (see images one and two).
However, there were also some galls (not nearly as many) which were a lot larger, and looked like a soft pale money bag (but they were quite hard). These galls occurred on the rib of a leaflet (see the third image).
Here are my two other observations of other examples of that larger gall:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/24764347
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/24764268
And here is a gall on BugGuide that looks like those big ones:
https://bugguide.net/node/view/532163/bgimage
It turns out that the big galls are indeed caused by "Box Elder Gall Midge", Contarinia negundinis, which is in the Family Cecidomyiidae - Gall Midges and Wood Midges.
So I thought that was cool, simultaneously finding some galls caused by mites, and some galls caused by midges on the same species of plant.
Thank you to some input from Charley Eiseman.
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.................................INTERESTING UPDATE FROM AUGUST 2019:
In August I noticed some strange little pink granular clusters on some of the young leaves which also had the Box Eldger Pouch Gall Mite galls:
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/31812587
Then @megachile suggested that perhaps the pink clusters could be Maple Erineum Mite (Aceria calceris). He said that "The Amrine catalog says that Aceria calaceris, which causes red erineum on Acer glabrum, was reported on boxelder too. Amrine notes that he thinks it's probably a mistake but that is a possibility."
