Pandemic Librarian Gets Back to Nature

A couple of years ago, I took a week-long Master Naturalist's class at the Montana Natural History Center in Missoula. We immersed ourselves in the plants, birds, insects, fungi, mammals, and geology of western Montana.

It was too much information, but I did learn about a couple of free apps that make it much easier to identify plants, butterflies, and pretty much anything else in the natural world that will sit still long enough to for me to take a photo.

My favorite app is "Seek." It's produced by the California Academy of Sciences and National Geographic. The app is free and it's amazing. You can use it like a camera to focus on a flower or other plant and watch it work to identify it. Success is not guaranteed, of course - sometimes the app can figure out just the order or family. But with even what look to me like fuzzy photos, Seek provides a quick ID, as with this California Tortoiseshell butterfly:

"Seek" works best with things that don't move around much, like this glacier lily I came across earlier this week in Kootenai Canyon:

Not sure which fungus you're looking at? Seek had no trouble identifying the wolf lichen bellow

Seek is part of an app called "iNaturalist," which is produced by the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society. iNaturalist gives you access to all kinds of online guide books, and it will show what species of birds, plants, bugs, and so on have been identified in your area. You can track your own observations, too.

For bird enthusiasts, I highly recommend both Merlin and the Audubon Society's app. They have bird identification helpers and bird songs, calls, and range maps. Very cool stuff.

I still have well worn copies of Sibley's Guide to Birds and Kershaw's Plants of the Rocky Mountains, and I still use them. But I like lightening the load of my knapsack by having a lot of solid information available on my smart phone.