Not noting precise locations where photos were taken in my pre-iNat / non-cell phone days.
Not taking pics of undersides of leaves, mushrooms, moths (e.g. Desmia), crayfish.
Not making the effort to get spore prints on mushrooms, to learn how to do chemical analysis on lichens.
not somehow finding it earlier - in 2008 right when it appeared, and a bit before I left California
Not taking good photos, and not tracking location, before I had iNat.
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(Just moved some posts from similar topics to this one.)
Just a few weeks ago, I saw a very long lizard on my patio, unlike any Iâd seen before. It was very slender, had a very elongated spine with the legs much further apart proportionally than a fence lizard or alligator lizard. It was, oh, about 8 inches total length, and sort of an even pale tan color. I turned to get my phone, and watched it slither down a crack in the paving before I could get even a bad shot. Iâve tried to look through obs of lizards in Santa Clara County, but did not spot it yet (among all the western fence lizards and alligator lizards). I do not think it was a whip-tail.
kinda off topic but thats awesome!
Well, iNaturalist defines ârecentâ evidence of an organism as within the last 100 years, so if you have pictures of any of those, itâs not too late to upload them.
Yes indeed. I sometimes use the âExploreâ tab to revisit places I went in person long ago. When I am âExploringâ Monteverde, Costa Rica, and someone uploaded an observation of Peperomia hernandiifolia, it definitely takes me back.
I spent so much time out in nature before there was an iNaturalist, I donât feel the disappointment many here describe. The cattle egret colony at Gri-gri Lagoon, Rio San Juan. The black-crowned night heron stalking a nest, grabbing an egret chick by the head. The chick struggling free, falling, but saving itself by grabbing a mangrove branch on the way down. Hanging head down by one foot for a while before eventually pulling itself up to perch on the branch. Meanwhile, the yellow-crowned night heron and the turkey vulture appearing, opportunists, waiting. The egret chick, now upright on the branch, the three predators gone as their chance was missed. I felt like I was in a wildlife documentary! And it never crossed my mind to fumble around for the camera, because that would have taken me out of the moment and made me likely to miss something. Seeing all of the events unfold mattered more to me than getting a photo.
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Mysterious! If not an alligator lizard nor a whiptail, I think it must not be a native lizard. There are only a handful of native lizards in Santa Clara County.
Mysterious! If not an alligator lizard nor a whiptail, I think it must not be a native lizard. There are only a handful of native lizards in Santa Clara County .
Oh, maybe an escapee from someoneâs terrarium! I try to keep an eye out for it, but so far it has not turned up again. Thanks for the pictorial list; it did not look much like any of those species - it was too slender and even colored. Unless, perhaps, it was just an ectomorphic melanin-deficient alligator lizard. I did not get a good enough look at its head.
Baby alligator lizards are mostly tan, but they wouldnât be anywhere near 8 inches in total length.
For me, the most frustrating time was while hiking Quandary Peak in Colorado. As I was photographing American pikas on the talus slope, a flock of brown-capped rosy-finches landed on the boulder field about ten feet away. As the rosy-finches landed, they startled a pika that dashed toward me and in turn startled a dwarf shrew that scrambled up on top of a boulder five feet in front of me. I had my camera on and pointed toward it, but I couldnât focus on the shrew before it darted back down between the boulders. This would have been the first research-grade observation of the species on iNat (my casual observation is still the only observation of any kind). This was quite frustrating, but I was happy just to see this species and to get good photos of the other two!
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I guess not epic but would have been really cool photos. A couple days ago was out in our yard looking at birds with just my binoculars. I didnât have my camera because itâs dang heavy and the lighting was bad for shooting birds up in the trees anyway. And I didnât have my phone because I was wearing PJs with no pockets. I saw a flash of black and white and by the size figured it was either a Downy Woodpecker or a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker. I walked closer but couldnât find the bird. I gave up and started watching a Ruby-crowned Kinglet while standing in the same spot. I saw another small bird in the same tree. I couldnât get a good look but I was pretty sure it was an Orange-crowned Warbler. The bird gradually came from behind the branches and I could see I was right. And then it flew to the group of small trees directly in front of me. At eye level and only about 6 feet away, it was drinking sap from fresh sapsucker damage to the bark of the trees. The flash of black and white I saw must have been a Yellow-bellied Sapsucker flying away from these trees. Orange-crowned Warblers are usually hard to photograph because they are so active when hunting for bugs, but this one stayed in one spot drinking sap for a bit before moving to the next tree in the grouping. The lighting was great; I could have even gotten a decent photo with my phone had I worn some pants with pockets and brought it with me. 
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First and only time I ever saw a spotted owl - it was about 20 ft away from me, on a low branch, in perfect evening sunlight. Of course it was the only time Iâve left my camera home while hiking in the past 5 years.
Then on the way back to the car there was a tiny fledgling songbird of some kind clinging to a branch about a foot from the trail, which would have made an amazing photo as well.
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A few months ago a mink was getting into my chicken pen and chasing them. Someone always ran out and chased it away before it actually caught one, but still crazy. Now we have smaller wire at the bottom of the fence so it canât get in. But anyway, we had the rooster in a smaller cage temporarily, and it came trying to get in there; it couldnât get through the fence, but he was freaking out. I ran out to chase it away, yelling at it, but it hesitated a little before heading into the woods. It was only about two feet away from me. Every time I saw it I wished I could get a picture, but I was too busy saving the chickens.
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I remember one of my travels in specific to the place known as Jagueyes de MayascĂłn (jagueyes meaning âpoolsâ or âlagoonsâ) that emerge from the heart of a mountain in northern Peru. In the car I was staring out of the window, when I saw a beautiful, big bush with large blue flowers (2 or 3 I think?). It was the middle of nowhere and the camera couldnât capture the flowersâ details. I have yet to see a flower so pretty, it was of a very intense electric blue, like a thinned Pthalocyanine Blue. It resembled Evolvulus yet the flowers were larger and it was erect, not decumbent.
In another travel, I saw what I think is Commicarpus tuberosus growing on the forest floor, but the camera didnât work. It didnât focus and Iâm left with the mystery. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/68124093
The last one was a little more interesting. 8 years ago, I joined a group of friends to a travel deep in the Peruvian wilderness, close to what is now Pitipo. We found a very large, dense forest, with trees of faique (Vachellia macracantha), what I assume was guayacan (Handroanthus chrysanthus), hualtaco (Loxopytergium huasango), Charan (Caesalpinia sp.) and maybe even Guazuma spp. The floor was blanketed with herbaceous plants of all kinds, cactuses and climbers. That place has vanished, as Iâve returned there for the last 4 years in search of it, with no luck.
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I know itâs too late, but if you photograph plants with without background using autophocusing camera you will get many blurred images, you need to put anything behind them, like hand, your leg, piece of paper, and it will be easy to focus on. Maybe all of your plant pics would be half-way pics of yourself, but all the needed details will be seen too! Plus it wonât move with wind.
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This happened to me more recently. An albino raccoon. White with orange stripes as opposed to gray with black stripes. There was even a normally-colored specimen standing right next to it for comparison. But albinism must also correlate with skittishness because it scampered off while the other one continued eating. FML
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This very afternoon I had an epic photography fail while iNat-ing. I drove 30 minutes across town to a new park and trail system in a different ecosystem (half of our city is limestone hills, the other half is blackland prairieâI live on the limestone side). I walked and photographed for 4.5 hours, covering 2.5 miles. When I was almost back, I ran out of camera space, so I attempted to free up space by deleting a whole dayâs worth of photograph. I picked a day during the great freeze in February because I know Iâve already downloaded them. Somehow, I managed to delete a whole day all rightâtoday. I could just cry. Whimper, sniffâŚ
I lost photos of a zillion cool plants, including some teeny, tiny ones that I think I got enough info to ID. Some of them were new to me. I lost pictures of two ecosystem disasters: a bamboo forest and a Ligustrum (multiple species) wasteland, where new trees canât grow to replace the ones that are dying of old age (and maybe lack of resources) so itâs almost entirely Ligustrum and fallen limbs and trunks, with a few widely scattered mature trees and a few oak saplings. There was a passionflower that might be new to me, but Iâll never know. There were tiny flowers and fruits on Dichondra carolinensis (Ponyfoot).
There was a cute fox squirrel noisily rummaging around in leaf litter hunting for and eating nuts. There was a green anole that sat on a bridge railing under grapevines and allowed me to photograph him up close: he had a colorful spot on his neck and had his entire tail. A red-shouldered hawk in her nest (ID by a birder who lives nearby and watches the nest)âI just got an adult-sized head bobbing over the nest edge. A few damselflies. A weird zebra striped bee/fly/moth pollinator on Dewberry flowers. A tiny butterfly with colorful spots on gray wings. I had audio recordings of hawk, crows, owl (?), and various tweety birds. I got three different species of lady beetle to crawl on my hand long enough for unobstructed photos. Two of them spent time on my camera lense, but I wasnât able to get my phone out for that amusing shot, so theyâre lost.
The two biggest losses were what Iâm almost sure was an ant-mimic spider hanging out with leaf cutter ants and a really cool new-to-me super-long-tailed butterfly. I wanted to ID the butterfly so I drew it from memory and submitted the observation. Computer Vision even found a good species match :-) I was counting on the photos to count the legs and body segments of the suspected ant-mimic, so Iâll never know about that one,
There was also a cool art project where people made strings of hearts out of various found materials and hung them on a fence railing along a bank of the creek. I really wanted to post those on social media because they were so cheerful.
I see another trip across town in my future, on a day with lots of free time.
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and clear the camera memory before you go!
I think of all the cool things Iâve stopped and observed prior to joining iNat and getting a camera (for me it was in THAT order)⌠all just a memory and not recorded⌠but there is nothing worse than that sense of loss when you thought you had something, to only lose it through a momentary lapse in concentrationâŚ
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You can retrieve any deleted files if you didnât overwrite them yet. Iâm using File Recovery.
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Sadly, I did overwrite them. But I still have my memories and now that Iâve written it down, the memories will stick better.
I usually carry a spare card, but didnât have one today.