Takoma Park Hosts the City Nature Challenge

By Anna Mische John, Vegetation Maintenance Supervisor

Have you heard of the City Nature Challenge? How about a bioblitz? The City Nature Challenge is a friendly competition form of a bioblitz—an opportunity to observe and document plants, insects, animals, and fungi on a particular site.

On April 29, the City hosted its first City Nature Challenge event. While the City is new to hosting, some of our residents are veterans of the project and active in documenting living organisms through the iNaturalist website.

This event took place over one weekend, in 482 cities across 46 countries. Participation in the annual event has been steadily growing since 2018. The D.C. Metropolitan area ranked fifth worldwide for participants and ninth for the number of species logged.

For this event, we worked at Circle Woods, the two-acre site located between Cockerille and Poplar Aves. and Spring and Circle Aves. The day started off wet, but by the time our birding group gathered, the rain had stopped and held off for the remainder of the event. Over three hours, nearly 200 individual species of birds, insects, and plants were documented at Circle Woods. Some of our noted observations included a horsehair worm (a parasite not often seen outside of its host) and a wood thrush (a species of concern due to its population decline in recent decades). We also saw what turned out to be the most observed species globally: the mallard duck. A nesting pair has made Circle Woods their home.

The Circle Woods City Nature Challenge was a fun way to get out and explore our natural world and meet neighbors. We hope to continue to track biodiversity at the site over the coming years as the plant composition changes with ongoing restoration work.

This article was featured in the June 2023 Newsletter. Visit the Takoma Park Newsletter webpage to see the full list of past newsletters.