During the month of August I will be participating in Blaugust, a month long blogging challenge.

There’s two apps on my phone that I really like, and use a lot. The first is Merlin, the app from Cornell that helps people to identify birds. The second is Pl@ntNet, a free app that helps people to identify plants. They are both great, and thanks to Merlin I am getting better at guessing which bird I am hearing as I am out walking with my OH. I’m better at plants, but still appreciate having something to check when I’m not quite sure, and again it’s adding to my enjoyment of my walks. The problem is that both depend on having an internet connection, and quite often I don’t have one while out and about in rural Scotland.

So the super power that I’d like is the power to identify any flora or fauna, by sight and sound for birds, and to always be right. Here’s a coot I saw earlier – no need for Merlin to help me to know what this is, but I wish I’d had my phone out to record it shouting as it swam towards me.

Coot flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license