Who

WildCounts was created and is edited by Jon Sullivan (kia ora). I’m a New Zealand ecologist and avid nature watcher. Since 2003 (before smart phones!), I’ve been refining a personal method for wild counting that let’s me quickly and easily count the wild around me. I started doing it while biking to work, and now I do it wherever I go.

Over the last few years, I’ve been averaging 3,500 observations a week. That’s the equivalent of one and a half observations every minute for a 40-hour work week. It’s the equivalent of one of the top contributors to the annual four-day City Nature Challenge, but done every week. Yet, I still just do it while I’m doing other things, like biking to work or running for exercise. This kind of long-term ecological monitoring is simple and fun to do.

Since I started, I’ve made well over a million observations. These are consistent, geotagged and date-time-stamped counts of all the individuals I see, and hear. That’s of a diverse, predetermined set of species that I’ve chosen to watch. Taken together, they’re revealing the stories of wild nature in my home city and how the wild is changing.

One of my motivations for making the WildCounts website is to share how, and why, I do this. I’d be stoked if other people gave it a go.

I’m based in Aotearoa New Zealand, so there’s a Kiwi flavour to a lot of the wild counts on this site, although I’ve also counted the wild in California and Australia. When I’m not out counting the wild, you can find me at work as an ecologist at Lincoln University, New Zealand, or online at iNaturalist NZ helping others to identify the wild things they find.

I’m always keeping an keen eye on the rest of the world. Please get in touch if you’re keen to help or know of someone counting the wild that should be profiled here. You can reach me via email at [email protected], you can message me on iNaturalist (@jon_sullivan), and I’m on Mastodon at @[email protected].