iNaturalist Sightings

1st May 2026

I wanted to see my iNaturalist observations - across two separate accounts - grouped by when they occurred. I'm camping this weekend so I built this entirely on my phone using Claude Code for web.

I started by building an inaturalist-clumper Python CLI for fetching and "clumping" observations - by default clumps use observations within 2 hours and 5km of each other.

Then I setup simonw/inaturalist-clumps as a Git scraping repository to run that tool and record the result to clumps.json.

That JSON file is hosted on GitHub, which means it can be fetched by JavaScript using CORS.

Finally I ran this prompt against my simonw/tools repo:

Build inat-sightings.html - an app that does a fetch() against https://raw.githubusercontent.com/simonw/inaturalist-clumps/refs/heads/main/clumps.json and then displays all of the observations on one page using the https://static.inaturalist.org/photos/538073008/small.jpg small.jpg URLs for the thumbnails - with loading=lazy - but when a thumbnail is clicked showing the large.jpg in an HTML modal. Both small and large should include the common species names if available

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