Do you like birds? Mushrooms? Wildflowers? Conifers? Nudibranchs? Butterflies? The Fingered Limpet?

I bet you do like one or more of them. Humboldt is a place that loves nature. Whenever you ask anyone why they live here, or the benefits of living here, it’s just about guaranteed that the beauty of our natural surroundings will be the first thing out of their mouth.

A few months ago, when we ran that great old Humboldt Historian article about native lilies, it occurred to me that we, the Lost Coast Outpost, Humboldt County’s home page, haven’t adequately reflected the county’s fierce love for the wilderness and wild things. You rarely ever see a sea urchin busted for fentanyl trafficking.

But that changes today! Because today we are proud to launch HUMBOLDT LIFE, a little interactive database of the animals and plants and fungi and kelps and such that are known to inhabit our borders. (I’d say that it’s we that inhabit their borders, but they don’t have borders.) We’re pretty excited about this!

Humboldt Life gives you pictures, maps, a short description and a taxonomy of around 4,600 species of beings known to live in Humboldt County, along with links to find out more about them. This data comes from the great iNaturalist website, a worldwide hub for scientists both amateur and professional. Most people who record their observations on that site license their data under a Creative Commons license, so we’re able to share a Humboldt-specific peek into the data they collect.

How does it work? I can walk you through it. Go to the top of the taxonomic tree, there — Life. If you’re looking for a specific creature, you can use the search feature at the top of the page, there. Start typing and the system will start looking through the common and scientific names of creatures we know to exist here. Click on the one you’re interested it, and it takes you to that page.

For example:

Now, you can also browse, if you like. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see the immediate taxonomic subcategories of “Life”, and below that illustrations of each of those subtaxa.

Click on any of them that catches your fancy. You may continue to browse up and down the tree from each of the pages you land on.

Each day at 5 a.m. the Outpost will pick a species to celebrate, based in part on what’s “in season” — flowering plants in the spring, say, or a migratory bird when it shows up on our shores. Fall is coming up, so expect a lot of fungus. Today’s animal of the day, as you’ve probably seen, is the Western Spotted Skunk. Go there, learn about this lesser-seen cousin of the stripey skunk, and share your thoughts!

It is our sincere hope that this new feature brings some of the natural world closer to you, on the days when you cannot be closer to it. And if you’re ever tempted to get more serious with your botanizing, you definitely want to install iNaturalist on your phone to join a pretty amazing community of citizen naturalists. If you’re a total newbie like me, you also want iNaturalist’s Seek app, which does a pretty good job of identifying what you’re pointing your phone at.

Enjoy!