The Mystery Ogre-Faced Spider

So I was sitting at my desk, working, when all of a sudden I look up and there was this spider.

Not just an ordinary spider. It had long legs and it was vaulting this way and that, casting crazy shadows.

Quick! I sprang for my Seek app. I opened it up, fired up the camera, and aimed it at the big bug.

It was an American Ogre-Faced Spider!

However it held off on telling me the exact species. And zut alors, while I was trying to zero in on it from different angels, the spider vanished. I went back to work. 

A few minutes later I saw to my delight that the American Ogre-Faced Spider was back! I tried photographing it again. However this time the app decided it was a fly. It identified it as one of a number of Common Crane Flies.

"Idiot," I told Seek. "It is not a Common Crane Fly."

It is an American Ogre-Faced Spider!

However now it is gone again and I do not think I will ever know which one, exactly. The picture up above, it is not my picture. It is from Scientist magazine. However that looks like the spider I saw, I will tell you that.

Come back, American Ogre-Faced Spider!

Come back1

Doh! A deer

 

My naturalist adventures continue. Today was kind of dark and threatening however still I managed to work in a walk at Forest Lawn.

And I bagged a deer!

I mean on my Seek app that I have been carrying on about. There were all these noisy gardening machines going in the cemetery and so to get away from them I had climbed up on this ridge. I was walking along looking at trees and thinking about -- OK, this is like old times, but I was thinking about Leonard Pennario and his composition "Midnight on the Cliffs." That was what I was writing about this morning. Suddenly -- there in front of me -- oh, deer!

See him in the distance?

The seek camera is finicky. Usually the camera is blurry when you try to zoom in and you do not know what the picture will look like until you snap it. So as time was of the essence I switched to my phone camera. This was pretty good...

... however not good enough for Seek, perhaps because of the gravestone behind the deer.

Snap! Again.

Oh, deer me!

Doh!

 Finally I struck gold with the Seek camera.

This is nice that the Seek camera photos show up among my normal photos. I used to worry I would not be able to share them. However yes, this is the magic picture. The app identified it. 

I could not believe that the app identified the deer. I could not believe it. And the deer has a beautiful name.

It is Western Roe Deer!

This is a Eurasian species. I am not sure how it got here. And a male Roe Deer is, you guessed it, a Roebuck!

This one must be a doe because it has no antlers.

A Roe Doe!

Spotting the Spotted Turtle

The other day I wrote about snapping the Snapping Turtle.

Today it is all about Spotting the Spotted Turtle!

I went to Tifft Nature Preserve after Mass on Sunday. I like swinging by Tifft after church because the Outer Harbor is just over the Skyway from St. Anthony's. It is thrilling at Tifft to walk those wooden walkways over those swamps where God knows what goes on. One Sunday a few weeks ago we saw snakes! Another girl there pointed them out to me.

"They are so gross!" she shuddered. And I agreed.

That did not stop me from trying to get the snakes' picture for my Seek app however it was not to be. The Seek app, as I have written, is finicky.

Which brings me to yesterday, Sunday. I was at Tifft and now I am canny, I am alert for turtles. I spotted one at a distance however it was not close enough to get a picture. Then, heading over one footbridge, I saw the handsome chap at the top of this post.

Looking at him now, he looks like a Painted Turtle. However the app was having none of this turtle -- amazing, considering how much better photo could I have taken? I took more and more. 

These are just two of many pictures I took. It grew maddening to tell you the truth. The app kept sniffing that no, it could not identify it. It was some species of Box Turtle, then it was simply an Animal, and so forth.

I did get into conversations with sympathetic Buffalonians and one gentleman told me there were more turtles to be seen up the way. I went where he suggested and that was where I found this specimen.

The app ate this one up right away and said it was a Painted Turtle.. 

So I went happily on my way. Although I had affection for that first turtle.

Later on yesterday, I re-submitted to the app a couple of pictures of that first turtle. That worked before, with the Snapping Turtle. The app finally reconsidered and identified that photo I took, which, come on, was excellent.

This time the app, after a bit of back and forth, relented, and barfed up that it was a Spotted Turtle.

I looked up Spotted Turtle and to my distress I found that it is rather rare, and threatened, and endangered. Sure enough, on my app, it said that there were only four other sightings in the area.

This seems to be a bit of beginner's luck I am having in the turtle department. I hope some of that luck rubs off on this cute Spotted Turtle. It is funny, I found myself thinking about it later, pondering the Spotted Turtle and its plight, hoping that the species would rebound and flourish.

Another picture of my new friend.

I hope I will see him next Sunday!

 

Breeding Like Rabbits

 This is a cute rabbit that hangs out in our yard. We have reason to believe there are baby rabbits beneath our back porch.

It is an Eastern Cottontail! The Seek app identified it.

I also saw this kind of rabbit on the Ring Road at Delaware Park. So I trust this ID.

Our property is alive with baby animals. There is this robin's nest on our garage left over from several years ago. It was sweet to watch it once upon a time. Howard and I watched the baby robins with their mouths open, and then we saw one of the babies -- the last one! -- take his first flight from the nest.

It made me sad to see the nest empty and I kept thinking I should clear it out. However I never did. And now, lo and behold, there are eggs in the nest again and a robin is sitting on them!

That made my day to see that!

Rabbits and robins. Two of the cutest animals in the world.

Right here in our own back yard!

Snapping the Snapping Turtle

Yesterday I was walking around Hoyt Lake in Delaware Park and who appeared?

The turtle!

I believe it was the same turtle we met back in, yikes, 2009. There is no reason to doubt that as the Common Snapping Turtle, as I now know this to be, can live to over 100 years old.

I now know this to be the Common Snapping Turtle because of my Seek app. The Seek app has been preoccupying me lately and when I was walking yesterday, I was on complete Nature Alert, trying to sight new species.

Right down by the lake's edge, trying to avoid the goose poop, I all of a sudden saw this turtle in the water. It was just hanging out in the shallows. At first I thought it was a rock. That is how the turtle is designed.

Then I caught my breath because I recognized it for what it was.

Quickly I snapped the snapping turtle with my app camera. Incredibly, seeing that the turtle was right under my nose, the app did not recognize it and did not give me credit.

That is where you are in trouble with the app. You take another picture and you lose the first one. I hurriedly got onto my phone camera and took more pictures. The app did not accept them either. That is the problem with Seek. It can be finicky.

Breathlessly I tried again.

 

I can see that these challenges I am participating in are not nature sighting challenges as much as they are photography challenges. It is hard to get pictures of these creatures!

Meanwhile the turtle was swimming away. Can you see it?

 

Later, miraculously, the app did accept one of my phone photos -- the one at the top of this post. However because I did not take it with the Seek camera, I see it does not count toward my challenges. One of those is the Lakes and Ponds Challenge which I have been really working on. That was a disappointment.

But still. Whether or not the app accepted any of my photos really does not matter now that I think of it. Here is a good thought that struck me:

Without the app, I would not have seen the turtle! 

I would have been walking obliviously past the way everyone else was. There was a couple walking past and I wanted to show them the turtle, however they did not look at me and they were talking so the heck with them, they miss out. That would have been me. 

Thank you, Seek app, for keeping my eyes open!

Wild goose chase

 

I have been having luck with my Seek app. I am discovering all kinds of new species!

The American Boxwood is one. I know, you see this hedge everywhere. The reason I mention it is, it has the greatest Latin name.

It is Buxus sempervirens! The "sempervirens" must mean evergreen. However it is the box part that I love.

Buxus!

Also there are several waterfowl I adore. The one up above is one that I see frequently in Forest Lawn Cemetery. I actually only see one. That is a picture I took up above. It is a Gray Goose, aka Anser Anser.

This Anser Anser Gray Goose hangs out with two other geese. Both of them seem to be Graylag Geese although they are a little bit different.

Anser Anser and the two Graylag are like the Three Musketeers, always together. They roam around by Mirror Lake. Above is a picture I took of them napping.

Here they are taking a stroll. And yes, the trees in the background are Japanese Cherry. I checked!

I fell in love with Anser Anser and his big orange feet and beak. 

You look at him and just know there is a God, you know? Someone had to come up with that.

And the Graylag Goose. I think of this one as the Mother Goose goose.

I have identified 75 species so far. My friend Melinda went walking with me this morning and I bagged a lot of those sightings with her help.

However nothing has been as much fun as this Wild Goose chase!

The Seek app, my new obsession

My friend Melinda and I were walking the other day when she introduced me to this app called Seek, by a company called iNaturalist. You get to track your sightings of nature.

You know me, on my walks I love to observe strange creatures, plants, and trees.

So I immediately installed the Seek app and pointed it at a tree. It identified the tree however now I have forgotten what the tree was. I did not know you had to take a picture for the tree actually to be entered on your list of observations. That is one thing I love about the Seek app, that it keeps track of your observations.

Since then I have taken the Seek app on several walks. I have taken it to Forest Lawn Cemetery and to Tifft Nature Preserve. And around the Delaware Park Ring Road, where I observed the bunny up above. The app identified the rabbit an Eastern Cottontail.

This is just so much fun! 

The one drawback is, I have to say, when I first pointed the app at that one tree, I must have had beginner's luck. I am finding it is a challenge to get the app to identify things. Occasionally it identifies a species right away, however that is the exception rather than the rule. As a rule it is finicky. It tells you to adjust the angle, which I do, and take more photos, which I do. Even then I often end up having to give up on some element of nature and move on to something else. 

So that is frustrating. At first I embraced it as part of the game. However I watched a YouTube video of a guy using the app and he kept saying, "And it quickly identified this as..." He kept using that word "quickly." So now this gets on my nerves. I cleaned my camera lens, just in case that was the problem, however it is still finicky.

Here is a thought on that. I have learned that the app identifies things based on photos people have taken and posted to its sister app, iNaturalist. Many of the things I have been unable to identify are not the sexy plants, the plants everyone would be photographing and posting. They are these common grasses and weeds. Perhaps there are not enough photos of them. Maybe no one has bothered to take pictures of this grass I was trying to ID.

Another app issue: I am not sure how I am to take pictures of fish -- especially pictures that are up to the app's exacting standards. I am working on in the Lakes and Ponds Challenge but I do not think I will be able to include fish.

I have one sighting so far in that Lakes and Ponds Challenge. That is the Broadleaf Cattail!

 

I observed that fine specimen at Forest Lawn, in their wetlands area.

I still need 9 more items for this challenge. You need 10 items from: dragonflies, amphibians, fish, ducks, mosses, ferns, water lilies, bulrushes, and cattails. At Tifft on Sunday I tried to identify some cattails there however the app drew a blank on them. They were probably the same species anyhow.

However I did rack up three species observations at Tifft. I identified Colt's-Foo and the Common Motherwort/

And -- ta da -- the Great Stinging Nettle.

The plants at Tifft were not as diverse as I was hoping, my time was limited because the rain was moving in, and I was not able to get a good picture of any of the little birds swooping around. However I was proud of the observations I did chalk up.

Three more good things about Seek: 

1. It is free!

2. It does not engage in annoying behaviors like showing you ads or nagging you to upgrade to a paid plan. 

3. I am actually learning things! This was funny, I looked at a tree and was disappointed because I recognized it as a Saucer Magnolia. And I had already sighted a Saucer Magnolia.

Then I realized: Hey, I can recognize a Saucer Magnolia!

Imagine how smart I will become!