So. Many. Mayflies.
What a spectacular day we had yesterday! Wherever you were in the DC observation area, you probably had sparkling sunshine alternating with puffy cloud cover, and brisk breezes all the way through to advisory-level winds in some spots. This made for challenging photography conditions (hard to focus and respond to rapidly shifting light conditions) but it offered a really invigorating day to walk around and explore! In the Potomac Gorge, after some alarmingly high late afternoon winds that made us consider running for cover, @carrieseltzer and I walked back on the C&O Canal towpath littered with twigs, branches, limbs and entire trees that had blown down. This gave great opportunities to look for galls and leaf miners in formerly unreachable branches that had been delivered to us at ground level.
Later on, I made a point of looking beneath leaves along the C&O Canal to see who had taken cover there. We had been seeing mayflies all day, and I was happy to see so many of them apparently safe and undisturbed under the leaves. Red ones! Green ones! Black ones! Golden ones! Transparent ones! Large ones and tiny ones! As I uploaded the photos last night and saw that mayflies are an entire order with 42 families, 400+ genera and 3,000 species, I thought, so much for getting any species ID's but at least the pictures and the memories are pretty! And then when I woke up at 5:30 this morning, I was amazed to see that @tortes had stepped in and actually named some. Many thanks! It's incredible what the iNat community can do. I'm particularly enjoying the coloration similarities between Little Dark Hendrickson and the Brood X cicadas that will be emerging any day now.
It looks like yesterday was a great day for many others as well. On the leaderboards at this moment are @jmgconsult, @capitalnaturalist, @casadoray, @ronwertz, @zdanko, @lkhandley and @peggyo. And many, many thanks to top identifiers @tca12345, @tlit46, @lucareptile, @tminatbe, @jackierai, @nanjemoycreek, @davidenrique, @catimoses, @alex_abair and @rinwolfe: It's your efforts that make iNat feel like magic.
Top ten species observed are Virginia creeper, poison ivy, tuliptree, mayapple, Virginia spring beauty, black cherry, jack-in-the-pulpit, Canada goose, garlic mustard and common dandelion. Virginia bluebells, which have been in the top 10 in some previous years for CNC-DC, are almost done with flowering this year and are way down the list at about number 86. It will be interesting to see how this year's later date and phenology will result in different species being more frequently observed compared to previous years.
