About Nature By Name
A one-person project for learning the birds, plants, fungi, insects and everything else you keep seeing and forgetting.
I'm Eric
I grew up spending a lot of time outdoors: building fires, catching grasshoppers, salamanders, frogs, minnows, garter snakes. I loved all of it. I also knew almost none of it by name. A grasshopper was just a grasshopper. Now I know what I was catching were Red-legged Grasshoppers, Spring Peepers and Yellow-spotted Salamanders.
Years later, hiking and portaging pulled me into iNaturalist, and before long I had logged more than 500 species. That sounds like knowledge, but ultimately the app was doing the heavy lifting. I still could not reliably name the things I saw.
Most nature tools solve the first half of that problem: getting a name. I wanted help with the second half. I had used Anki for other kinds of study, so I went looking for nature decks, but nothing fit the places I was going, the season I was in, or the species I had already seen.
Nature By Name is my answer: a way to move species names out of an app and into memory. I love it, and I hope you love it too.
Why the name
Knowing what something is called changes how you see it. A brown bird becomes a Song Sparrow. Then you notice when it is back in spring, which bush it sings from, and that the one next to it is something else.
The name is not the point. It is the way in. This is less about collecting labels than about becoming more at home where you already are.
How it is made
I build and run it myself, and I want to keep it small enough that one person can keep improving it. Species, photos and sounds come from open sources such as iNaturalist and eBird, and every photo and recording is credited to the person who made it. Some photos, sounds and traits come from people using Nature By Name, too.
Start with whatever keeps catching your eye.
A local bird, a park, or the mushroom you keep seeing after rain. Pick it, then come back to it. If something feels off or missing, tell me in the forum inside the app.