Started in 2016 as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco in the United States, the City Nature Challenge (CNC) has grown into an international event. It motivates people around the world to find and document wildlife in their own cities. In 2023, over 1.8 million wildlife records were submitted across the globe over four days! Run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), the CNC is an annual four-day global bioblitz at the end of April, where cities are in a collaboration-meets-friendly-competition to see what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal. The competition uses the iNaturalist app on your phone or computer to record biodiversity data using photos or sounds, and share it with a world-wide community of scientists and nature enthusiasts!
As part of our contribution, we will be putting our gazebo up in three different places over the weekend:
- Saturday 27th April 1030 to 1430 in the car park of All Saints Church, Huntington
- Sunday 28th April 1030 to 1430 By Haxby Weir on the Earswick village side
- Monday 29th April 1030 to 1430 in New Earswick on the riverbank between the Link Road bridge and Lockkeeper’s Cottage
Hopefully, we’ll have some experts standing by in the gazebo to help you identify at least some of the wildlife you find. If you can’t identify what you’ve found, then within days the iNaturalist community will identify it for you.
Bring your family and friends too, anyone you can persuade to join us in finding as many different wild species as possible will be welcome. There’s no need for any expertise, just an interest and a wish to find out more. All you will need to do is take a photograph on your phone or digital camera and put it into the INaturalist App which is used as proof of sighting. We’ll show you how to use it. If you don’t want to use your phone, any digital camera can be used, and the photos uploaded later.
If you do have some knowledge of any aspect of riparian wildlife, and could help people identify what we find, please let me know.
