Cape Condons

When I first started experimenting with myObservatory I wanted to choose something close to home.  So I picked my yard!  Over the past year I have been collecting GPS tagged photos with the myObservatory iPhone app.  This past early summer we suffered an infestation of caterpillars...three different species over the span of two months.  Every day we worked to save our favorite trees by spraying down and squishing caterpillars (an endlessly fun project for the boys).  Even with these efforts nearly every leaf on our property was consumed.

I tracked defoliation and caterpillar populations with photos.  These photos were automatically geotagged and available on the desktop myObservatory map view.  Here is an example of what the desktop view looks like.

You can see that each photo is saved by location on the map.  When you click on the photo icon the data viewer window pops up and gives the options to open the data in a new window, to add new data or to preview the data.  The photo previewed in this screenshot was taken on June 23rd and shows the defoliation of the wisteria wall that borders our yard.

Below is a photo taken near the same place on May 19th.  Aside from the mini athletes playing whiffle ball in the foreground you can see all of the wisteria blossoms and the early foliage.  In case you don't have any nearby to watch, wisteria starts blooming in the spring and the leaves come in as the blooms start to fade in color and fall off. My husband has been weaving the vines into a privacy screen for the last three years.  Over time the wall has more than tripled in size and the number of flower clusters has increased dramatically.

Then this year the caterpillars consumed every leaf and blossom from every vine!  We assumed that this would be the end of the wisteria.  But to our surprise (and relief) it came back.  And more than that it bloomed a second time in places.  Having myObservatory allows me to quickly catalogue photos of the observations I make while I am making them.

In writing this blog post I realized that I never took a photo of the "re-foliated" wisteria!  So I went back through my photos on my phone and found one from October 3rd.  Look at the lush dense leaves!  Now I get to add it as a new record in the station Yard for future reference (when I have long forgotten our plight with the caterpillars).