The Mt Rogers Naturalist Rally: Backyard Edition is off to a fantastic start! It is delightful to have so many participants in our iNaturalist project. We love seeing you getting outside to Explore, Discover, and Share with us.

If you didn’t know, we are giving away a BRDC Species T-shirt each day to a lucky observer. So far the winners are Carolyn Unger, Nicole and Natalie Freeman, and John Unger. Congratulations! We also have great raffle prizes and drawings daily. If you haven’t gotten your rally/raffle tickets yet, there is still time to win some big ticket items. Check them out on our website.

As we mentioned before, the Backyard Edition iNaturalist project is booming with observations. Less than half way through the project, we have an impressive leader board with over 2,300 observations and 700+ species. The greatest collection is in plants, then insects, birds, and fungi, respectively. Kudos to Theresa Burriss and several others very close to her number of 169 observations! We are loving seeing all these wonderful organisms and some really great photos to go with them. One special species photo we’d like to share is Jenny Brown’s trout lily. Thank you, Jenny!

As part of the Rally, BRDC staff and a few socially distanced volunteers assisted with our NABA Spring Butterfly Count. This was our first spring count and we had a gorgeous day for it. The Mt Rogers High Country Butterfly Count is a 15-mile diameter circle centered around the BRDC campus. Each individual observer was delegated an area to count throughout the day. The species and total number were low but that is to be expected in the spring. We were still able to count and capture a few photos of some great butterflies. One in particular was an early hairstreak found and photographed by Bruce Grimes.

This is a great find as the species is vulnerable throughout the US and imperiled in Virginia. Imperiled means this species is rare and local over a broad range, and highly threatened by the loss of its foodplant to disease. The North Carolina Natural Heritage Program ranks this species as significantly rare. Please enjoy some of the butterfly species photographed this weekend! Thank you, Bruce, Allen, Matt, and Cade for helping us count our precious flying beauties. Stay tuned for our summer and fall butterfly counts and how you can participate.

Thanks to Dennis Ross for his iNaturalist journal contributions thus far. A truly talented and genuine naturalist, Dennis inspires us all to get out and observe our surroundings, take notes, and sketch or paint what we see. Here’s what he says: “I have been using iNaturalist for years, since it was started in California by Scott Loarie as part of his PhD work at Stanford and UC Berkeley. Scott is the son of a close friend from Medical School. I mostly post just for myself, to keep tabs on what I see. I keep a timeline of when flowers bloom, birds appear, and total species in my immediate area (about 700). I also enjoy seeing what everyone else posts and learn much from that. I have made many friends through iNaturalist, some virtual and others I have met. The Mt Rogers Naturalist Rally is off to a great start with so many observations. I am in awe of you all.” DENNIS ROSS

Enjoy this “remote” Rally week. Visit our website, iNaturalist, Facebook, and Instagram for a glimpse of the week through snapshots, observations, blogs, and live webinars. Join us everywhere and don’t miss a thing! See you outside! #MRNR, #BackyardEdition.