Two Weeks from Tomorrow
You know what starts in two weeks, yes? It's the City Nature Challenge! Go look at how many areas around the globe are participating: https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022.
Four days of tromping everywhere, looking at everything, getting wet and muddy and, I hope, not tick-ridden, uploading hundreds of observations, confirming IDs on hundreds of other people's observations, and glorying in SPRING! It's FUN!!!
Also, there might be ice cream. And you can ignore the garden and housework without guilt, because this is for science (for a loose definition of science). It's at least raising environmental awareness, which is, frankly, more important.
But I'm torn this year. In the last three years, I've mostly done the Boston City Nature Challenge (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022-boston-area ; it includes much of eastern Massachusetts), either as myself or as Mass Wildlife when I was still working. In 2020, I spent two days in the Boston area and two in the Pioneer Valley City Nature Challenge area (https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/city-nature-challenge-2022-pioneer-valley ; the three counties through which the Connecticut River flows). The Boston CNC is very well-organized; over 1,800 people participated last year. The Pioneer Valley CNC, which was started in early 2020 out of UMass Amherst, has been hampered by the pandemic; only 189 people participated in 2021. They are looking for people to help organize the Valley CNC, but it's too late this year to get up and fully running.
I don't live in either CNC region (anyone want to start a Worcester County, MA, CNC?). Doing the CNC in the Boston area involves a minimum of an hour's drive, up to three hours one way to get down to the Cape. That's a lot of driving in four days - not terribly environmentally sensible. I can drive 15 minutes and be in the Pioneer Valley CNC area; the farthest reaches of that area are maybe an hour and a half drive.
What I'm inclined to do is work the Valley CNC for four days and call it scouting for next year, 2023, when maybe I'd be foolish enough to work on organizing the colleges and universities, the environmental groups, and the local iNatters to do a full-on Valley CNC. In the my dreams, I'd like to see more City Nature Challenge regions in Massachusetts: greater Boston, Worcester County, the Pioneer Valley, and the Berkshires. Not unreasonable, and why not have more CNCs across New England while we're at it?
What do you all think?
