Thank you to reader Shireen for sharing this awesome crowd-sourced project. You may have caught my post about one institution's struggles to make herbarium specimen cards available to researchers. SERNEC Herbarium is a digital archive project that relies on people like you and me to digitize nearly 30,000 U.S. specimen cards for public access. It takes only a few minutes to type in the information you see on the specimen card, but the experience is one that transcends space and time. My first specimen actually hailed from a state park about an hour away from where I grew up, and was cataloged by a female scientist in the 1960s. Talk about cool.
Here is a screencap of the entry screen to give you an idea of how easy it is; just identify the label on the card and you'll be provided with a zoomed image. The system will prompt you for fields like specimen name or name of the recorder and you just type in what you see!
The Wood Duck is probably the most amazingly colorful waterfowl in the world. The Wood Duck male bird has a metallic, purple-green head and ridge. His abdomen is white and his chest is dark red. Along the neck, they have attractive, narrow white stripes. Their wings are colored in blue and black.
ReplyDeleteFemale ducks are not as colorful as males. They have a gray-brown head, white belly, and a white chest. The male bird uses its colorful plumage to attract females during the breeding season.
These ducks live in swamps, wooded swamps, and streams throughout North America. With unique colors and shapes, these ducks are also one of the most easily recognizable birds in North America. Unlike other poultry, they nest in tree holes and form groups.
The Wood Duck is probably the most amazingly colorful waterfowl in the world.