Photography meets citizen science: April's wildlife in south-eastern Pennsylvania

Following on my posts from last month, during May I'll be posting some articles about the animals that I photographed during the month of April. I started observing wildlife in my yard during March as a way to improve my photography skills and soon started submitting the photographs to the iNaturalist web site, thus transforming my photography practice and Steem blogging activities into a citizen science activity. In April, I really stepped up the pace.

The first post for this month is an overall summary of April's activity:

• I saved almost 1,800 photographs in my photo album for the month and probably threw out more.
• I submitted 64 observations covering 23 unique species.
• Of those 64 observations, all but 5 have now been boosted to "research grade".
• I learned some interesting facts about ospreys.
• I learned some of the "field markers" that make it easy to identify Red-tailed hawks, even in flight and even when the red tail is not visible.
• I learned of BirdCast, where we can see population counts of migrating birds throughout the continental United States. The site even gives overnight radar coverage at the level of individual counties.
• I visited Hawk Mountain Sanctuary and Marsh Creek State Park and made observations at both of those locations (to be frank, I see more wildlife from my own yard in the Philadelphia suburbs than I saw at those sites, but it was nice to take a couple short hikes).
• I learned that Claude and Gemini are pretty good at identifying wildlife, but they make occasional mistakes. Grok, ChatGPT, and Perplexity are fairly bad at this task. For birds, the best AI identifier seems to come from the Merlin cell phone application. In all cases, though, you need to verify it against actual photos in order to be sure. None of them are 100% right.
• Got a photo of two Robins together in their nest.

And here's the complete list of animals that I submitted to iNaturalist from April 1 to April 30:

Common Name	Count
Red-tailed Hawk	12
Turkey Vulture	10
Mourning Dove	5
American Red Squirrel	4
Blue Jay	4
Northern Cardinal	4
Northern Flicker	4
Red-bellied Woodpecker	3
American Robin	2
Eastern Bluebird	2
House Finch	2
American Crow	1
Bald Eagle	1
Brown-headed Cowbird	1
Carolina Wren	1
Cooper's Hawk	1
Dark-eyed Junco	1
Downy Woodpecker	1
Osprey	1
Painted Turtle	1
Red-winged Blackbird	1
White-breasted Nuthatch	1
White-throated Sparrow	1

All of those, except for three, were observed from my own back yard. The painted turtle and the white-throated sparrow were observed at Marsh Creek State Park on April 4, and I just realized that I still need to post a dedicated article about that day trip. The Red-winged blackbird was observed at the Sandy Hollow Heritage Park.

Stay tuned for more details and photographs in future posts. I'm not sure exactly how I'll split them up just yet, but there are a few items to cover that I think will be interesting to viewers and/or readers.

Has anyone else thought about contributing to iNaturalist? If you do, please blog about it here on Steem, too! It would be great to expand Steem into the Citizen Science ecosystem.