September 7, 2019 marks the first official celebration of California Biodiversity Day, an annual event created last year to celebrate the state’s exceptional biodiversity and encourage actions to protect it. The city of Claremont Park Rangers together with the Friends of the Wilderness Park will be observing California Biodiversity Day 2019 at the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park.
Join us this Saturday, September 7th from 6:30am to 9:30am and learn how to use your phone to contribute to science and the Wilderness Park with iNaturalist! Just look for the canopy near the North Mills entrance for more information!
Already an iNaturalist user?
Please come and help show others to use the iNaturalist app!
New to iNaturalist?
iNaturalist is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. iNaturalist is a collaboration between National Geographic and the California Academy of Sciences. Anyone can participate in iNaturalist!
Before arriving on Saturday please:
- Go to iNaturalist.org and create a free account. You should see “SIGN UP” featured prominently on the homepage. Otherwise, there’s a “Sign Up” link in the top right corner.
- On your smart phone, go to the Apple Store or the Google Play store and download the iNaturalist app.
Once you’ve signed up, you can enter observations from either your phone or computer. The iNaturalist site has a really good explanation here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/getting+started
The page also has links to video tutorials.
The Wilderness Park Biota Project:
The Friends of the Wilderness Park have created an iNaturalist project for documenting the plants and animals of the Wilderness Park. If you make iNaturalist observations in the Park, they will automatically be collected and added to the project!
If you’d like to check out the CHWP project and see what’s already been reported, just go here:
https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/biota–of–the–claremont–hills–wilderness–park
A few tips for best practices:
- If feasible, crop your photos to feature the subject, especially if it’s not clear whether the subject is the bird or the tree, for example.
- Include a little description. For one thing, you can use the description to say what’s the subject. But you can also note any additional details, interesting behavior, type of habitat, odors, etc. that may not be obvious from the photo.
- Give the most specific ID you can, even if it’s not to the species level. For instance, “insect”, “snake”, or even “plant” or “animal” is better than just having “unknown”.
- Give a little info about yourself in your profile — it increases your credibility.
As the name implies, the host for Mountain Mahogany Hairstreak caterpillars is Mountain Mahogany (Cercocarpus montanus), but the adults love to nectar on buckwheat. Like the Bernardino Dotted-Blues, these butterflies only fly in June and July. Look for a brownish-gray butterfly with a white streak on the wings and a little “tail” on the hindwing.
The Ceraunus Blue butterfly is seldom found in this area; its normal range is south and east of here in South Texas, Florida, Mexico, and Central and South America. This year, however, a number are showing up in our area. Look for small bluish-grey butterflies with a series of darker dashes on the wings and one or two “eyespots” near the bottom edge of the hindwing.
The Pacific Burrowing Wasp is a “beewolf”, a solitary, predatory wasp that preys on bees. Female beewolves dig nests in the ground, then hunt bees, which they place in the nest. They then lay their eggs on the bees, which become food for the larvae. The adults, however, eat pollen and sip nectar. These colorful yellow and black, green-eyed little wasps won’t bother people – just bees.
Leafcutter Bees do not live in hives like honeybees; they are solitary and usually nest in pre-existing holes in wood or hollow stems. Females typically cut neat, round pieces out of leaves to serve as separators between cells in their nests. They collect pollen to feed their young. Unlike honeybees and many other bees, which have “pollen baskets” on their legs, female Leafcutter bees have a furry abdomen for collecting pollen. (If you see a bee with a yellow tummy, it’s probably a Megachile.) When the female Leafcutter bee returns to the nest with pollen and some nectar in her crop, she kneads the mixture into a bee loaf, adding some of her saliva, which may contain antibacterial and fungicidal substances. After repeated trips to build the large enough bee loaf, she will lay an egg on top and seal the chamber with chewed-up leaves. Leafcutter bees are good pollinators and unlikely to sting. If you’d like to attract some to your garden, you might try putting a “bee hotel” near some flowers; a Megachile may 
These green-eyed yellow flies actually belong to the insect family of Horse and Deer Flies (Tabanidae), but unlike typical members of this family, Pegasomyia do not drink blood; they eat pollen and drink nectar from flowers. A vegetarian Horse Fly – who knew! The bright colored eyes are iridescent and can look red or green depending on the viewing and lighting angles.
Female Golden Paper Wasps lay their eggs in cells in the familiar “paper” nest, then when the larvae hatch, they hunt caterpillars to feed them. Interestingly, they don’t sting their prey, but use their powerful mandibles to chew the prey into pieces to feed the larvae. The adults, like the one here, generally take nectar. Golden Paper Wasps are generally not aggressive and are unlikely to sting unless provoked. They can actually make a nice addition to your garden, as they will help to control caterpillars.
Friends of the Claremont Hills Wilderness Park 