Bindea (Porcupine Reserve) and surrounds: plants, animals and fungi's Journal

Kia ora koutou (hello all)

Welcome to all the newcomers on this project, it is great to see! And thanks to all of you who came to the iNaturalist workshop nearly a fortnight ago, Jon and I had a ball.

It's great to see how many observations have gone up since that workshop - we were at about 220 records before the workshop and have now just clicked over to 500. And that is before Jon starts uploading the many hundreds he made during his time here!

Please keep popping up any new observations you have and others will try and get them identified. You'll need to patient for some groups (e.g. herbaceous plants and invertebrates) as there aren't many experts working on them in this region. But the IDs will eventually come.

There is already some really interesting things that have come out of our observations. For instance, this one of the everlasting daisy by Michelle drew some attention (read the comments), because the daisy in the photo is a known, but as yet undescribed species:

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/237768242

This means it is likely a new species, but already known to the relevant taxonomic experts. I'm going to collect a voucher (physical specimen) for them and send it up to the Herbarium at UNE, where they are working on that group (Xerochrysum).

There are many other exciting finds up there, including this wolf spider and its trapdoor, as photographed by Jon at night:

https://inaturalist.nz/observations/238693383

There are lots of other neat observations, please feel free to reply to this with a link to your favourite.

And please keep taking photos and lodging the observations!

Cheers

Tim

Well done everyone! This project is now up over 1000 observations, and over 270 species recorded.

This news article may be of interest, discussing some of the new species described in Australia last year. Over 70% of Australian species remain unnamed, and there will undoubtedly be some amongst our observations on Bindea:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/sep/08/laughing-frog-and-david-attenborough-worm-among-750-new-species-recognised-in-australia?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Cheers

Tim