Take part: City Nature Challenge 2026
- Birkenhead Butterflies
- Apr 20
- 3 min read
April 2026
What is the City Nature Challenge?
This weekend is the City Nature Challenge where cities across the globe record the living things in their surroundings. From the early hours of Friday 24 April to the last gasps of Monday 27 April, tens of thousands of observations will be made across New Zealand and it would be wonderful if more Aucklanders took photos of what is around them and uploaded them to iNaturalist.
Why join in?
You do not need to know anything about wildlife to participate. No Latin names required. If you recognise something is a bird or a fungus, that's enough, and iNaturalist will do the rest. New Zealand is a unique biodiversity hotspot with so many species found only here in Aotearoa. 'So many' means an estimated 80,000 unique species. Google AI told me so it must be true. In Auckland we have a ton of introduced species as well, some deliberate, some not, that come off the planes and boats in Tāmaki Makaurau. That's all worth recording. You can learn more about the wild things that share our cities and engage your children with nature. Kids are good at spotting the little things and it can feed their curiosity. Later, scientists can use the data.
Civic pride is at stake
This event started as a friendly citizen science competition between Los Angeles and San Francisco 10 years ago. In Aotearoa it has become a competition between Wellington and Christchurch. Yet Auckland is NZ's most populous city. What about us?
In last year's competition 284 people made 4,100 observations of 1,195 species in the Auckland region. Sounds a lot, right? It was a huge increase from 2023 when Auckland recorded 1,368 observations of 544 species by 174 people. Well done us! Except Christchurch managed over 25,500 observations by 389 people and Wellington recorded the highest number of species at 2,452.
We can do better. We will do better. If everyone reading this recorded five things a day over the weekend, that would all add up and it would only take a few minutes. Everything counts except dogs, cats and people. Every different butterfly of the same species you see is a new observation. What plant it is resting on / feeding from is a new observation. The honey bee and the bumblebee next to it is are two new observations. It's quick and easy!
Next steps
Download the iNaturalist app and create an account. Links below.
Take photos of wildlife around you whether at the beach, in your garden or at work.
Upload your observations to share with the iNaturalist community.
Simple!
Read instructions on how to make an observation in the app:
You can also register and upload digital photos from the website iNaturalistNZ
I'll be an armchair enthusiast for reasons
There's always that spider in the corner of the bathroom you could record...
However, if you are curious but cannot join in, you can watch Auckland be humiliated by following progress at City Nature Challenge Aotearoa which tracks all the cities and areas across the country. You can always see what other people have found locally by looking at City Nature Challenge Auckland. I often look at the weird and wonderful things people have found in Auckland as a more cheerful version of doomscrolling in my spare moments. Turns out I am not the only one to have heard a kākā in our road this week...
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