Finally: An App That Can Identify the Animal You Saw on Your Hike

The legendary naturalist John Muir once wrote: “Whenever I met a new plant, I would sit down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance, hear what it had to tell.” The first step to making an acquaintance is to get a name—and naming nature is not easy. This weekend, while walking through Great Falls Park, a butterfly landed on my friend’s leg. It was large, with yellow and black wings—clearly a swallowtail, but what species? That same day, a large black insect landed on a flower in front of me, and I snapped a portrait of it before it flew off. It was a dragonfly, but what kind of dragonfly?

Many of our experiences of nature take this form. You see something, but you don’t know what it is. You are surrounded by life,,” says Scott Loarie from the California Academy of Sciences.