The Daily Bucket is a place to catch your casual observations of the natural world and turn them into a valuable resource. Whether it's the first flowers of spring or that odd bug in your basement, don't be afraid to toss your thoughts into the bucket. Check here for a more complete description.
It's not often that my enthusiasm for trekking around looking at bugs and weeds crosses over with my enjoyment of gadgetry. OK, there are the four different "GPS for idiots lost in the woods" apps I'm running on my phone just to keep from suffering a repeat of a few... incidents, but for the most part my gadget needs inI the great outdoors are limited to a love of how quickly a Jetboil oven can crank out that first morning cup of coffee.
But this morning I came across the announcement for a new iPhone app that seems right in line with bucket-duty.
The Discovery Channel's SciSpy app is intended to do just what we're doing here – record casual encounters with creatures and plants. In essence, the app is a photo capture and categorizer, with predefined categories for things like "bugs in the backyard" and "at the birdfeeder." Collected images end up cataloged on Discovery's site, along with times and locations. The result is a searchable archive of nature images.
I'm not abdicating the backyard science arena to these guys, or encouraging you to share images there without putting them first in front of the greedy eyeballs here, but it's a fun little app and the searchable database turns up some nifty pics.
My own spying on the outdoors reveals that roses both wild (in this case, the Prairie Rose Rosa setigera and the non-native Wild Rose Rosa multifora) and "nearly wild" (hybrid floribunda) are both producing leaves. The tea rose near my well house is also getting started on its annual growth spurt, which sees it from trimmed-back-to-near-nothing up to damn-those-thorns-are-everywhere each year. It's already left rents in a pair of trousers when I unwisely turned my back near the vicious bush.
Over in the greenhouse, I'm finishing up the last steps. The shelving is done, the louvered window in place, the automatic opener on the roof vent installed. I even think I did it correctly. There's still plenty of glazing to go in around the windows, and more paving base to be added before the floor is filled in nice and level, but I spent last night putting tomato, cucumber, carrot, and pepper seeds into their little starter pots. Veggie time!
What's going on where you live?
Today's observations come from these locations
Share your own observations in comments, and I'll add a marker to the map. Please give a city and state (as close as you feel comfortable in providing). Green pins for observations mostly about plants, brown for animals, and blue for weather or other inorganic items. The letter at the center of each pin will be the first letter of the user who provides the data.