Participate in the 2024 City Nature Challenge with TNC Washington on a nature walk through the Port Susan Bay Preserve! Help the Seattle-Tacoma Metropolitan Area (including Everett, Seattle, Bellevue, Tacoma and any place within Snohomish, King and Pierce counties!) show the world how biodiverse our region is by making observations of local species during City Nature Challenge!

What is the City Nature Challenge? Started in 2016 as a competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco, the City Nature Challenge (CNC) has grown into an international event, motivating people around the world to find and document wildlife in their own cities. Run by the Community Science teams at the California Academy of Sciences and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHM), the CNC is an annual four-day global bioblitz at the end of April, where cities are in a collaboration-meets-friendly-competition to see what can be accomplished when we all work toward a common goal.

This event: We’ll take about a 2-3 mile walk through TNC’s Port Susan Bay Preserve, which holds some of the finest estuarine habitat in Puget Sound. Its marshes, vast mudflats and tidally influenced channels support hundreds of thousands of birds, several species of salmon, smelt, English sole and clams. We’ll move slowly making observations of plants an animals along the way and record them in iNaturalist.

Where: Port Susan Bay Preserve, located near Stanwood, WA

When: Saturday, April 27th, 10:00am - 1:00pm

What: Nature walk through the preserve to collect and make observations for City Nature Challenge. A smart phone or device is required to record observations on the iNaturalist app.

The trail is mostly flat with possibilities for mud, rocks, depressions and with little to no shade coverage. There is a honey bucket on site. This event is suitable for most ages.