surabhi_srivastava_gaur's Journal

Thanks to the iNaturalist "Nature in Winter" event, we spent the last few days of 2021 looking for new species to document. A road trip to Vijayawada led to an amazing find - the Uppalapadu heronry and pelicanry near Guntur.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uppalapadu_Bird_Sanctuary

This small site houses 1000s of spot-billed pelicans! Got to observe their nesting and feeding behaviours up close for an entire morning. Also saw quite a few painted storks, and Asian Openbills, Indian darter and cormorants. I have tried to document observations of many individual birds and their behaviour on iNaturalist, though it's impossible to cover the full glory and potential of this amazing site.

Here is a video of pelicans feeding their young.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/GtNeyJqZqQrCLdf5A

I hope this place will be discovered by other birders and nature enthusiasts who see these observations!

This entry of a Telamonia spider feasting on its prey marks my 1000th observation! The past 6 months have been a whirlwind of learning and observing the natural world. I guess the interest was always there but this app and the community of amazing identifiers have provided me an easy way to learn, document and contribute to our knowledge base.

Thanks and I hope to grow even more in my learnings in the year ahead.

Found a common Jay lying on the mud with crumpled wings last night. One wing is completely folded back on itself. My daughter got it home and it's now been placed on a wishbone flower plant, where it is just hanging on and not moving much. Earlier we had put it on the flowers of a miniature exora bush for the night but it fell off and was crawling on the mud in the morning.

Have placed a small sponge dipped in sugar water close to it, not sure if it will explore.

Now that we have our eyes peeled for new observations, thanks to iNat, we have been thrilled to find a couple of dead butterflies over the last month. However, recently my daughter came across what we thought was a dying butterfly. It was flopping around on the grass, unable to fly. We observed it for a while and figured it looked like a Common Grass Yellow butterfly, although there has been some debate when I uploaded my observation.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/88900386.

After mostly staying still or flopping on its side, it hopped onto the edge of my shoe and hung on. Not wanting it to get eaten by predators, my daughter suggested we bring it home. So we did and the day passed in a flurry of activity trying to figure out how to make it comfortable. We placed it in our small indoor balcony garden and fed it sugar water soaked in sponge bits. Surprised to find it alive the next morning, we gathered up flowers and spread them around with a sprinkling of sugar water for it to suck on. It did not move much but did manage to hop on some of the flowers and then, to our dismay, somehow dropped most of its left forewing. I added a note to the iNat observation, asking for advice but it got deleted somehow due to some sync issues I had at the time with the phone app.

To cut a long story short, the butterfly lived for about 5 days mostly staying still or briefly flopping around the fresh flowers we gave it each morning, ruining its wings further. It hid behind a pot or hung behind a leaf or petal for the first couple of nights and we could mostly only spot it suddenly lying sideways in the morning. Later it pretty much stayed in one or two spots on some flowers or on the floor.

We never actually saw it unfold its proboscis to suck the sugar water though we kept soaking the sponge pieces diligently. Does anyone have any experience with this? What could we have done better? Was it a good idea to bring the butterfly home and was it really dying - given the short life span, I was surprised it lived for nearly 5 more days at home!

We never did figure out its gender either or whether it even was a common grass yellow or a Lemon Emigrant as suggested by @firos_ak. Still looking for answers and hope we know better for the next time!

My first post on this forum about how I got here and how there's no looking back! As the pandemic lockdowns opened up, my family got caught up in exploring natural parks and the urban biodiversity around us. Looking for a way to answer my 8-year old daughter's queries regarding an organism's name or behavior, I found iNaturalist as the one-stop platform for information.

But I never imagined how interactive it could be and how supportive this community is. As we started posting our observations, we found immediate responses from other members, providing or correcting IDs - a learning in real time. And we joined projects, thanks to invites from @orfrigatebird and @ram_k that got us immediately involved in the data collection and in checking observations submitted by others.

Am thankful, and thrilled on my daughter's behalf, for the shout-out on @orfrigatebird 's South India Backyard Bioblitz project for maximum species observed in Telangana last month. You can read the journal post here https://www.inaturalist.org/projects/2021-south-india-backyard-bioblitz-/journal/54713-over-13-000-observations-and-2-700-species-in-just-one-month

Over the last couple of months, it has become a daily ritual to check comments and review our observations and IDs. My daughter prefers the Seek app by inat as it goes through the entire taxonomic classification while identifying an observation. I use the iNaturalist app and we browse the IDs and comments together. Looking forward to the learning, and confidence, to contribute more identifications back to the community soon. And meanwhile promote this fantastic community as widely as I can in my circles!