Treespotting

I’m more likely to write about nightlife than wildlife, but I do like urban observations in general, so Project Noah caught my eye. It’s a website and shiny new free iPhone app that lets people track, record and find out about the species in their environment.

Not surprisingly, I’ve mostly recorded very urban species (that’s not quite what Baudelaire meant by "the botanist of the pavement"), but it could be very useful for mapping rare plants, spiders, invasive species or even neighbourhood cats, if you were so inclined. It’s all pretty new in this neck of the woods, so there’s only my lightly-informed spottings of scrappy roadside cabbage trees and frightened little penguins to look at, but if more Wellingtonians get involved it could become a really useful guide to local flora and fauna.