These are wonderful! I am actually having quite visceral reactions to many of them: a sudden gasp of breath or an involuntary chuckle! Thanks so much for sharing these terrific images.
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Thank you! To celebrate my husbandâs retirement, we took a small-boat nature cruise to Glacier Bay in Alaska. I found this blue stone on a tide-pool excursion. I thought the tiny starfish were charming. There were numerous such blue stones mixed in the beach stones and I badly wanted to take one for a souvenir (but, I didnât).
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I tend to crop my iNat photos so theyâre not always the best compositions, but I save my favourite full photos to a file on my computer (one year I will make a calendar for my relatives, but it is not this year). The photos that I most like but my relatives wouldnât are mostly tiny things in focus, for example Valenzuela flavidus, or my very obscure Platycranus bicolor, which is now the genus picture.
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I have quite a few faves among my own observations. One major one being this observation of a beautiful intergrade kingsnake. This observation means a lot to me, even though it isnât a very good image, it was the very first Monarch I ever witnessed in person: Monarchs being one of the major species that got me into the natural world in the first place. Love this Three-toed box I found a while back.
Then there was that time that I came across the goose army.
This final observation has a story, probably the most random thing thatâs happened to me with wild animals. Three skunks randomly came up to our house one night, presumably because of the open bag of cheese-ball things we left out(you can still see some in this image, but we cleaned it up soon after and didnât let them get anymore), The next day(which is what this image shows), I stepped outside and sat in silence as they came up to me, some of which even rubbed against me, kinda like how cats do. At first we suspected that maybe they were someoneâs pet, but we soon realized that wasnât the case- as by the end of the two weeks that they came(keep in mind they were only âfedâ that one time by accident with the cheese balls), we counted 46 different individuals of skunks that came up to my house- one of them was a beautiful morph, it was mostly white, with a dirty-red stripe down itâs back. I unfortunately only saw this individual once, and never was able to take a pic. None of them ever sprayed, thankfully.
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Thatâs a terrific story - I can imagine it in my minds eye as an animation short. :)
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This slug just hanging out.
I think I see a face on this spider.
An unusually charismatic exception to my typically ugly-but-pragmatic plant photos.
This little guy was hiding.
One adorable crustacean.
It was really nice to go back and look at my old photos :)
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Congratulations! That is very satisfying.
The one perched on the antenna with an orange striped-ribbon is especially terrific.
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Yes, thatâs how I spotted it, first under the car then it flew to the antenna! It is a Georgian ribbon, big question why now itâs ok to put it everywhere when the 9th of May comes or even year-around.
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what a sense of dignity this bird and image convey!
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Itâs hard to select, really.
May be Melica altissima, which was very surprising for our botanists in that place.
Or this Tussilago farfara, It sprouted through the clay sediment after the spring floods.
And this Eritrichium sp.. There was about -35C, we had birding trip but I failed to resist to make some flora photos.
This rare white form of Lathyrus vernus.
The field of Dactylorhiza incarnata (4th photo in the observation).
This âbutterflyâ Phoenicurus erythrogastrus (3th photo). It was also quite frosty then, about forty degrees, and we were very surprised to see wintering redstarts.
And last one (for this message) is this Perdix dauurica from one august some years ago. I almost foot on the bird and had to move away to allow the lens to focus on it.
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Hard to choose, so here are a few.
I start with Phymateus baccatus, the one I feel is my most exotic one. This was observed at a place called âPride Rockâ (presumably a Lion King reference) in the Namibian bushveld. I was really reveling in just being in Africa.
The next few are all Caribbean.
This is the one I call the âJester Flyâ because of its colors and mannerisms. It is also the first time I ever got a good photo of a fly; I was so captivated by it, I determined that was going to photograph it well, and experimented until I did.
The color pattern on this moth startled me. It was so striking, it immediately became one of my favorite taxa.
When I first found this orange flower, I never would have guessed it was a cucurbit. Some years later, I returned to where I thought I had found it, but I have never succeeded in finding it again.
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Wow! That Redstart 
The spread of the wing is lovely.
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that is a crazy lookinâ critter!
I think, my top favourite is one of night heron with too large prey to handle. The bird was so preoccupied that it did not pay slightest attention to a small crowd of paparacci around it: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/35705199
The photos of the fish and night heron are breath taking! 
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Thank you. Though the photos could not show all that struggle.The inadequacy was funny and a little bit sad: when other herons kept happily feeding on small fishes, this one was going hungry.
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Thereâs a lesson to be learned hereâŚ
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