For most of my life, whenever I went on a walk, I would feel a pang of regret about not being able to identify trees or plants. Today, I passed 400 species observed on iNaturalist, 402 to be exact. I find this miraculous given how nature-blind I was up until four years ago. The silver lining of the pandemic was that I ended up learning a lot about birds and native plants, and I am deeply grateful for that.

My 400th species was the Northern Rough-winged Swallow. I saw a bunch of them in a tree by the parking lot at San Joaquin Marsh Wildlife Sanctuary, a glorious treasure that’s hidden in plain sight in Irvine, California.

I knew that they were swallows from their flight pattern, but I had never seen a flock of swallows just chilling out in a tree before. I’m used to Tree and Cliff Swallows, both of which tend to flutter about constantly and frenetically. I used Merlin to identify the exact species, which iNaturalist later confirmed. Then I just stood there with my Dad, watching them in wonder, before finally walking into the marsh to continue congregating with some other feathered friends.

Many thanks to Travis Kriplean, who helped catalyze my deep dive into the world around me by sharing his own journey so generously and comprehensively. I started my iNaturalist account in the Fall of 2000 with Travis’s encouragement and also with great skepticism, as I didn’t quite understand how iNaturalist worked, and the interface felt… challenging. I was dipping my toes into a mushrooming curriculum that Travis had developed, and I thought I would use iNaturalist to document my findings. I didn’t realize the giant nature-related U-turn I was about to take thanks to a run-in with a big, beautiful, brown bird.

I also have to give a lot of credit to Dario Taraborelli, who unwittingly primed me for all of this. I met Dario 15 years ago through Wikimedia, but I had no idea how much of a birder he was until I started following him on the Site Formerly Known As Twitter. (He, like me, is now mostly on Instagram.) He often posted glorious photos of birds, a stark and welcome contrast to the rest of my feed back in the day. He also sang the praises of iNaturalist, so much so that I knew about them well before I attempted to use the app.

Strangely enough, I don’t think this deep dive into nature would have been possible without iNaturalist and social media in general (and Instagram in particular). It still boggles my mind that iNaturalist’s interface manages to facilitate any kind of community, but it’s how I met Marisol Villareal, whose encouragement and engagement on Instagram helped me feel like I was a card-carrying member of a state-wide fan club, even though I’m still largely clueless. It’s how my friends, Jon and Linzy, met Rudy Wallen, an unassuming and generous nature savant, who also happens to live on our side of town. For all of the terrible that social media has wrought onto all of us, this is a great example of what social media can do when it works.