Simon Willison Releases iNaturalist Blog Tool, Uses It at PyCon

Simon Willison released inaturalist-clumper 0.1 on May 15, 2026 [1], a personal tool for publishing iNaturalist nature sightings to a blog that he had already been running in production for several weeks [1]. The release coincided with PyCon US 2026 in Los Angeles, where Willison documented bird sightings before and during the conference — including a Western Gull near a Starbucks on the opening morning [2] and a Brown Pelican spotted near the Los Angeles River on his final day [3]. All three items are authored by Willison himself, forming a closed loop between tool-building and field use.

The story illustrates how personal tooling can emerge from genuine practice: Willison built, refined, and then formally released inaturalist-clumper only after real production use shaped its design. The PyCon bird walks served as live demonstrations that the tool works end-to-end, with sightings published to his blog in near-real time.

Simon Willison released inaturalist-clumper 0.1 on May 15, 2026, a lightweight tool he built to bridge iNaturalist — the popular citizen-science nature observation platform — and a personal blog [1]. Rather than shipping at a speculative milestone, Willison had already been running the tool in production for several weeks, and it was that real-world use that drove design iterations before he settled on a formal release [1]. The announcement was characteristically terse: a brief statement of the tool's purpose and its production history, with no marketing gloss.

The release landed the same morning Willison went on a bird walk in Los Angeles ahead of PyCon US 2026 [2]. That walk yielded a Western Gull — spotted near a Starbucks — and a Rock Pigeon, both logged to iNaturalist and published to his blog [2]. The juxtaposition was unplanned but illustrative: the tool was already doing exactly what it was built to do, in the field, on release day.

By May 18, as PyCon wound down, Willison set out on a final morning walk near the Los Angeles River with a specific quarry in mind: a Brown Pelican [3]. He found one, along with a Glaucous-winged Gull, Snowy Egret, and Canada Goose, and logged the sightings before departing for home [3]. The three posts together — tool release, pre-conference sighting, post-conference sighting — read as a coherent demonstration of the workflow inaturalist-clumper is designed to support, even if that demonstration was incidental rather than staged.