Where I live, there is always a point some time in mid-August where I am suddenly conscious of the fact that autumn is coming. The other seasons don’t have such clear delineations, but as autumn approaches, the sunlight here is qualitatively different, the mornings are cooler, and the crickets — which normally chirp only at night — chat with each other all day.

If this is the sort of thing you notice too, then you’ll really enjoy Journey North, a global citizen science project to track wildlife migration and seasonal change. Although primarily aimed at the K-12 crowd, busy urban adults will enjoy a chance to reconnect with nature by learning about and observing the patterns of things like monarch butterflies, the intrepid hummingbird, whooping cranes, and grey whales. For example, did you know that grey whales travel an estimated 10,000 miles (about 16,000 kilometers) per year between their feeding grounds in the Arctic to their nursery lagoons near Mexico? Sort of puts the morning commute in perspective, doesn’t  it?

To participate, you just need to register and then report your observations via the Journey North website, or download and use the new (free) iPhone app for mobile reports.

Photo by Todd Cravens on Unsplash