Welcome to my second in-between episode. These are short episodes in between my interview episodes.  I’m calling this one Cool Tools - Nature Identification Edition! I'll cover what I think are great tools to aid you in identifying, and thus, learning about the nature all around us. I cover phone apps and websites like eBird, iNaturalist, Merlin, BirdNet, and iBird Pro. I discuss optics like hand loupes, binoculars - and how to choose a good pair. I also discuss what makes for a great field guide (book) and have a long list of recommendations - from birds to butterflies to dragonflies to spiders and plants.

My show notes have links to everything mentioned.

NOTE: I begin this show with some discussion of the historically bad 2020 wildfire seasons. I wrote a bit about wildfire causes, policies, and more in this blog post. There are links to all of the studies I mentioned and more resources in that post.