🌎 Discover Your World

Species Finder Nearby

What you could see near you this week of the year, and what it's up to.

📍 Finding your location…
Week –

Look up a species

1. Pick a group. 2. Type a few letters of its name (common or scientific). 3. Choose it from the list to see if it’s found near you and what it’s up to.

How this works, and how far to trust it
  • Where the data comes from: sightings that people post to iNaturalist. The app only counts confirmed sightings: ones with a photo or sound, a date and a place, where other people agreed on the species (iNaturalist calls this “research grade”).
  • The 5-year rule: a species is shown only if someone confirmed a sighting within your radius in the last 5 years. The one exception is common year-round residents: species seen here a lot over many years and seasons (at least 40 sightings in the wider area, with 10 or more in the last 5 years and 5 or more before that) that don’t migrate and aren’t declining. They stay on the list even without a recent nearby sighting, marked “Common here; few recent reports”. Migrating species (for birds, judged from when they’re seen here; also known migrant insects and bats) and declining or at-risk ones (from their conservation status, plus a short list: monarch, declining bumble bees, bats hit by white-nose syndrome, box turtle, hellbender, massasauga, chimney swift) always need a recent sighting. Each species’ details say which type it is and why.
  • Newer sightings count more: when working out seasons, sightings from the last 5 years count fully and older ones count a quarter as much. Quick answers use only the last 5 years.
  • How “This week near you” is ordered: short, special moments come first: the deer rut, fireflies, frog choruses, arrivals and departures, caterpillars, lady beetles gathering, nesting and young. Something that lasts only a few weeks beats something that goes on for months, and species confirmed nearby recently rank higher. No more than 4 of the top 12 come from one group, so a busy group can’t crowd out the rest. Pet cats and dogs are never highlighted.
  • “Just showing up” and “On its way out” are only claimed when there’s a real change: sightings now must be well above what they were a few weeks earlier (or will be later), there must be at least 5 actual sightings behind it, and year-round birds are never called arrivals.
  • Quiet for now: species are listed in the main section only when something about them changes within about two weeks of the chosen week. Hibernating, wintering or unchanged ones go in the folded “Quiet for now” list.
  • Bugs & biters: mosquitoes, biting gnats, chiggers, yellowjackets, horse and deer flies and ticks follow the actual local weather from Open-Meteo. In fall, the first night at or below a set temperature after Aug 1 ends their season: 28°F (a 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). For weeks beyond this year’s weather and forecast, the app uses the typical date at this spot from 2016–2025.
  • Groups: mammals; birds; reptiles & amphibians; fish; insects; land invertebrates (spiders, ticks, millipedes, centipedes, pill bugs, earthworms, snails and slugs); water invertebrates (crayfish, mussels, pond snails, leeches and the like). The water group only shows up when fish or water invertebrates have been confirmed in your radius in the last 5 years.
  • How seasons are worked out: the app counts each species’ sightings in each week of the year across the wider area (at least 50 km). More people are outside in summer, so raw counts would make everything look like a summer species. Instead, the app compares how often a species is seen in your chosen week with how often anything is seen that week. “Seen about twice as often as at a typical time of year” means that adjustment. Birds are compared with all bird sightings, since birders are out all year.
  • Life stages: where people marked a sighting as adult, larva/caterpillar or young, the app counts those around the chosen week.
  • Bird types (here all year, summer only, winter only, passing through) are worked out from the same weekly sightings.
  • Life-cycle chips marked typical come from a hand-made list of about 70 common species or groups (state wildlife agencies, Cornell’s All About Birds, university extension services). They describe the usual timing for the region, not what was measured here, and can be off by a week or two in a warm or cold year.
  • Keep in mind: sightings cluster near towns, roads, parks and keen observers. Showy animals get reported more than nighttime, underwater or hard-to-identify ones. A species missing here may simply not have been reported. Read “likely” as “people around here often see this at this time of year”.