Why count the wild

Welcome What is a wild count? WildCounts Manifesto Principles of wild counting Who Why I count the wild

How to count the wild

Introduction What-Where-When-Who-Why-How: make sure you do them all

Decide what to count

Decide what to count Predetermine what you'll count before you start

Learn the method

Wild counts methods Introducing WildCounts Shorthand WildCounts Shorthand vocab WildCounts app in FileMaker Go Introducing WildCounts Spoken The usual is not the same Your friend, the question mark Pacing the uncountables Record honestly, interpret later Why 40 to 60 is better than 50 Song then seen ≠ Seen then song Why it’s worth noting flying and flight direction

Improve your ID skills

Identify better, identify more

Gear up

Gear up Good apps for wild counting

Share your counts

Share your counts Share placeholder

Identify better, identify more

written Nov 15, 2023

Get better at identifying species

iNaturalist is a phenomenal tool for identifying species. You can share your photos and audio recordings and people from around the world will help you to identify the species.

To get started with iNaturalist, check out their help pages, and if you run into problems, there’s a vibrant community of iNat users on the iNaturalist Forum where you can post questions.

If you’re in New Zealand, the iNaturalist NZ community also maintains a list of preferred observation fields, many of which are helpful for adding more structure to your observations.

While photos and audio recordings are great ways to identify species, you don’t need a photo or recording for every wild count. Here are some tips on how to decide what to photograph.

If you want to step up a notch bulk upload annotated geotagged photos to iNaturalist, check out this workflow.