📍 Finding your location…
Tap the map to move. Solid circle: your search radius. Dashed: area used for seasonal timing.
Week –
This week near you
Quick answers
Would you see these right now? Seasonal timing from community records in the wider area, plus typical life-cycle stage.
Bugs & biters: done for the season?
Coming soon · Leaving soon
Compares this week (±1) with the 2–4 weeks before and after.
Active or changing near you
Only species whose status is changing around this week (a life-cycle stage starting or ending, arrivals, departures, a seasonal peak, weather-driven start or end) are listed. Static ones are tucked into “Quiet for now” at the bottom.
Quiet for now (no change lately)
Not suggested (5-year rule)
Recorded within your radius before, but with no research-grade confirmation in the last 5 years, and not a common resident. Migratory and declining species always follow this strict rule.
How this works, and how far to trust it
- Which species, and the 5-year rule: animals (and optionally plants) with research-grade iNaturalist records inside your radius. Each species is put in a bucket. Migratory species (birds whose local records show a summer, winter or passage pattern; known migrant insects and bats; species the timing notes say leave for part of the year) and declining ones (iNaturalist conservation status such as IUCN NT/VU/EN/CR or NatureServe G1–G3, plus a short hand list: monarch, rusty-patched and other declining bumble bees, white-nose-affected bats, box turtle, hellbender, massasauga, chimney swift) follow a strict rule: no research-grade record within your radius in the last 5 years means they are not suggested at all. Common residents (at least 40 records in the wider area, with ≥10 in the last 5 years and ≥5 before, and not migratory or declining) are kept even without a recent local report, labelled “Common here; few recent reports”. Everything else defaults to the strict rule. Each species’ detail view shows its bucket and why.
- Recency weighting: for seasonal timing, records from the last 5 years count fully and older records count ¼ (older ones are loaded in 4-week blocks, after the recent data). Quick answers use the last 5 years only. Cards show the most recent confirmed date within your radius where it has been looked up.
- Ranking “This week near you”: each species gets a “right now” score: how notable the current moment is (rut, firefly flashing, breeding choruses, arrivals and departures, caterpillars, lady beetle gatherings, nesting and young score high; “active” or “present” scores low), times how short that stage is (from the timing notes, or from how many weeks of the year hold most of its records), times how much it has been confirmed nearby recently, with the seasonal peak ratio as tie-breaker. No more than 4 of the top 12 come from one group, so one busy group can’t crowd out the rest. The top cards say why they are there. Domestic cats and dogs are never highlighted.
- Quiet for now: a species is listed only if something is changing within about two weeks of the selected week: a typical life-cycle stage starting or ending (including entering hibernation), a clear rise or fall in records, a seasonal peak, or a weather-driven start or end. Hibernating, overwintering or long unchanged stages go to the collapsed “Quiet for now” section.
- Bugs & biters: mosquitoes, biting gnats, chiggers, yellowjackets, horse/deer flies and ticks follow actual local weather from Open-Meteo. In fall, the first night at or below a threshold since Aug 1 ends the season: 28°F hard freeze for mosquitoes and yellowjackets, 32°F for gnats and horse flies, 42°F for chiggers. Ticks are only “mostly done”, because adults stay active on days above about 40°F. In spring, “back” means 5 days in a row averaging 50°F (mosquitoes, gnats, yellowjackets) or 60°F (chiggers). Weeks beyond this year’s data and forecast use the 2016–2025 median date at this spot, labelled typical. Thresholds and sources are listed in the footer.
- Groups: mammals; birds; reptiles & amphibians; fish; insects; land invertebrates (spiders, ticks, mites, millipedes, centipedes, woodlice, earthworms, land snails and slugs, springtails); aquatic invertebrates (crayfish, mussels and clams, pond and river snails, leeches, amphipods, aquatic isopods, freshwater sponges and the like). Ambiguous animals default to land. The aquatic group only appears when fish or aquatic invertebrates have been confirmed in your radius in the last 5 years.
- Weekly timing: for the wider area (at least 50 km) the app counts each species' records in each week of the year, with recent records weighted more (see above). It compares the share of a species' records that fall in your chosen week ±1 against the share of all records that fall then. That corrects for more people being outside in summer. Birds are compared against all bird records (birders are out all year), and everything else against all animal records, so the real winter disappearance of insects, frogs and snakes still shows. 1.0× means an average week; 2× means twice as many records as you'd expect; 0 means nobody has recorded it then.
- Life stage: where iNaturalist observers have tagged a life stage (adult, larva, juvenile), the app shows how many such records fall in this week window.
- Bird status (resident, summer breeder, winter visitor, migrant) is worked out from the same weekly iNaturalist records, eBird-style. eBird's own frequency data would need an API key, so it isn't used.
- Life-cycle chips marked typical for this region come from a hand-curated list of about 70 common species or groups (state wildlife agencies, Cornell's All About Birds, university extension). They are general regional timing, not measured locally, and can be off by a week or two in a warm or cold year.
- Biases: community records cluster near towns, roads, parks and active observers. They over-represent conspicuous, photogenic animals and under-represent night, aquatic and hard-to-identify ones. A species missing here may simply be unrecorded. Treat "likely" as "people around here often record this at this time of year".