Photography meets citizen science: May's wildlife in south-eastern Pennsylvania
Overview of May Photography
Here we are in June, so it's time for the next in my series of wildlife photography posts. As with last month, this first post will look at an overview of my photography and iNaturalist activities during the month of May. Upcoming posts will go into more detail.
My Google Photos album for the month contains a total of 2,252 photos for the month of May. This is up from about 1,800 last month. And, again, I deleted many others.
In total, I submitted 71 observations to iNaturalist covering 27 species. Of those, all but one have been boosted to "Research Grade". In comparison, I submitted 67 observations for April covering 25 species. (Some April observations were submitted after last month's post, when the total was 64.)
As with last month, my most common observation was the Red-tailed hawk, with a total of 9 observations. Out of curiosity, I just checked all May Red-tailed Hawk observations for Chester County, PA, and there were 15. So, apparently I posted 3/5 of the county's Red-tailed hawk observations for the month. ;-)
(I also posted 25% of the county's Bald Eagle observations.)
Here is a table from LibreOffice and Claude showing all of my observations for the month. Claude merged the counts, made the links, and did the sorting, so mistakes are possible in the links. I spot-checked 6 or 8 of them.
To be clear, the frequency of observations doesn't necessarily match what was happening on the ground. I could have submitted many more observations of American Robins, Gray Catbirds, Red-tailed Hawks, Turkey Vultures, and others.
Anyone who is reading this from Europe will recognize the European Starling. These birds were introduced to America in the 1890s by Eugene Schieffelin. He released them in New York's Central Park. Today, it is estimated that there are 93 million to 200 million of these birds in America.
For me, a big highlight of the month was the White-tailed Deer. As I mentioned in previous posts, I used to see them all the time in my yard - almost daily, but during the last year or so, they stopped showing up, and I don't know exactly why. Some people think they're a nuisance, but I like having them around, so I was happy to see this guy.
Other highlights included a juvenile Bald Eagle who flew over at a low enough height that I was able to get some decent photos; a couple bursts of photos of an adult American Robin feeding a fledgling (juvenile); and several incidents of mobbing behavior.
A final highlight was the observation of a Mississippi Kite. In my county, there are only 6 total observations of these birds across all of iNaturalist's years, and all happened between the dates of May 25 and June 18 (of different years). It seems that there's a very short time window to encounter these birds in my part of Pennsylvania.
One of the biggest surprises during May was that Meta's AI, Meta.AI is crazy-good at identifying wildlife. So far, it seems almost as good as Merlin and it can recognize other species besides birds.
I had been using Claude and Gemini until late May, thinking that Meta's AI was just an "also ran", but on a whim I decided to throw some challenging photos at it, and it did really well. It's my first choice now, if I'm not certain about an ID. Claude and Gemini are my fallback choices now.
Looking ahead to June
One last point before I close, is a quick look at what I might see in June. Here's a link to a search showing the birds and mammals that were reported to iNaturalist in my county during June of 2025. In all, there were 108 species reported.
And, as far as my favorite photography challenge, here are the raptors from June, 2025 that I suppose I might see (the data was downloaded from iNaturalist, made into a table in LibreOffice, and converted to markdown by Claude).
| Class | Order | Family | Common Name | Count |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Aves | Accipitriformes | Accipitridae | Bald Eagle | 4 |
| Broad-winged Hawk | 2 | |||
| Cooper's Hawk | 2 | |||
| Mississippi Kite | 2 | |||
| Red-shouldered Hawk | 5 | |||
| Red-tailed Hawk | 6 | |||
| Pandionidae | Osprey | 3 | ||
| Cathartiformes | Cathartidae | Black Vulture | 6 | |
| Turkey Vulture | 6 |
Out of 9 species, I have already seen 8, so the only new one would be the Broad-winged Hawk.
Wrap-up
If I want to give fair coverage to the May photographs, I think I'm going to need to post more of the "detailed posts" this month than in previous months, so it might be challenging fitting the posts into my evenings and weekends. We'll see.
After April, when the neighboring property owner razed much of the woods behind my yard, I thought May might be a disappointing month, but it surprised me. I saw some unusual activity from the "regular" birds, and I also saw several new species (for me). I don't know first-hand, but the rumor in the neighborhood is that the removal of the remaining bit of woods was stopped by the township - I assume for zoning/permitting reasons, so now it's wait and see to find out what happens with that property now. I have no idea what the owner's future plans are for that remaining patch of scrub.
Even without that remaining potential bit of habitat destruction, from what I've read, the spring migration season slows down in mid-May, and stops by mid-June. From now until fall, then, I suppose things will be a bit slower.
Appendix
Here are my previous wildlife photography posts:
April's photographs
- Photography meets citizen science: May's wildlife in south-eastern Pennsylvania
- [Citizen Science] April's Raptors in South-Eastern Pennsylvania
- Photography meets citizen science: April's wildlife in south-eastern Pennsylvania
- Learning photography with wildlife in south-eastern Pennsylvania: First encounters in the month of April
- Learning photography with wildlife in south-eastern Pennsylvania: First encounters in the month of April - part 2
- April wildlife observations in south-eastern Pennsylvania: repeated encounters with small animals
March's photographs
- Backyard Photography in Chester County, Pennsylvania during March 2026: Warm-up Shots
- [Citizen Science] Observations of Small Birds and Animals in South-eastern Pennsylvania from March of 2026
- [Citizen Science] The Raptors of March in South-Eastern Pennsylvania
Thank you for your attention!
All photos above were taken by me with a Nikon P1000 camera. I'm sharing them under the CC BY 4.0 license (share & adapt freely with attribution to the original source).
I'm curious, how do you balance taking such a high volume of photos with the task of editing and submitting them to iNaturalist? 📸🦊
0.00 SBD,
0.23 STEEM,
0.23 SP
I usually don't edit the photos. Sometime, I'd like to learn that, too, but it's too time consuming for right now.
As far as submitting to iNaturalist, once you learn to recognize the different species, submitting the observations is very fast and simple. A lot of the time, I'll just do the submissions through their cell phone app while watching TV.
By the way, I see that your account is new, so I wanted to mention that if you're using AI to write your comments, you should say so. It is generally disfavored here when people try to pass off an AI's writing as their own.
0.00 SBD,
0.20 STEEM,
0.20 SP
And for those who prefer audio/video, here's an AI narrated NotebookLM "explainer" video that summarizes the April & May overview posts.
100% of author rewards for this comment are directed to @null.
0.00 SBD,
0.20 STEEM,
0.20 SP