My top-observed animal taxon (not overall) is the snail genus Cepaea. One day, I noticed I hadn’t observed any gastropods. I saw three snails with slightly different colorations and thought, “oh boy, I can add three different gastropod taxa to my life list!” Lo and behold, they’re all the same genus lol.
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I seldom upload any one species very many times. There are only two species for which I have three observations – but I suppose they could be considered embarrassing. One is the coconut palm – can you get any more stereotypically “tropical beach” than that? The other is bristly oxtongue, which is one of the most ubiquitous weeds around here, which remains green and flowering after most everything else has gone dormant from drought. My other 356 species have only one or two observations each.
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Not embarrassing to me, but to my family maybe… Spilomicrus is my top species. Small black wasps that are probably ignored by 99% of people :p
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oh… i just looked at my species list and realized the only species ive observed over 100 times, with 130 observations, is the domestic muscovy duck. have to admit i was shocked to see how many of those ive observed. my 2nd is eastern gray squirrels with 91.
im not surprised when i think about it though. if i see a squirrel doing something funny, im going to take a picture. when i see ducklings or interesting color morphs, im going to take a picture. but im pretty sure a big reason i have so many of them, at least the ducks for sure, isnt actually cute - i try to observe any roadkill i see as long as i wont be next for trying, and there are a LOT of roadkill ducks. considerable amount of squirrels, too. so combine all that roadkill with the many times im walking and see a cute squirrel or duck, and… yeah
EDIT: apparently i also got a lot of my ducks by testing my trail cam in my back yard, where the wildlife big enough to be captured consists of probably 95% muscovy ducks. and when i put it by a tree in my yard or a natural area, i get a lot of squirrels.
so, cute + roadkill + common trail camera capture = lots of observations
actually i think i have a folder of squirrels i got on my trail cam at one park that i never got around to uploading… so i could make it worse
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My top 10 are all Bees, 9 of which are Bumble Bees. What can I say, maybe I do have a problem, how on earth did I let Western Honey Bee pass a 10th Bumble Bee?!
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Our only shared bee is the honey bee. Where’s Bombus pensylvanicus on your list?
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People in general love birds, not spruces. There’re tons of crow observations too. You say it as if people only photograph mallards with phones, but mostly they use cameras. I saw enough wild mallars that are afraid of people, you can come closer than 200 metres if you wish, but also 200 m is more than enough to photograph a bird.
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Self-identifying as a “plant person” it is maybe not overly surprising that 43 of my top 44 are plants - except for the very top spot. My most observed species turns out to be the monarch butterfly - or rather a mix of all sorts of its life cycle stages. I’m not overly embarrassed though about my monarch obsession outranking my plant observations. I did purposefully plant a butterfly garden/monarch waystation after all so I would have an opportunity to take all those pictures.
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There’s nothing embarrassing about my top 10, but I do feel guilt every time I see an invasive plant and think “aw but it’s so pretty!” For example I adore Briza maxima and even a field of Avena swaying in a breeze is so soothing…
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I guess some of this is common, but embarrassing to be in the top 10? I don’t think so.
Some get photographed a lot just because I can’t tell without a photo (eastern tailed blue or something else tiny? little orange and black butterfly which is that?) My entire top 10 are gorgeous and fun to photograph, so not embarrassed at all.
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the only real “embarassing” one is probably butterfly-bush (Buddleja davidii). it’s very slightly invasive! it grows in bridges, gutters, pavements, walls, everywhere! and that doesn’t count the observations i’ve taken of stuff on the plant! and yet, i think it’s pretty in it’s many, many colour-morphs.
Guernsey fleabane is a species I only found interesting after an iNat observation - it’s introduced, very localised in the UK, and has plenty of lookalikes. It’s probably very overlooked as it likes to grow in waste ground and pavement’s edges. but really, I think in urban areas that’s where there’s the most plant diversity - you get native and naturalised plants that would be pulled up as “weeds” if they grew somewhere more cultivated, and you get plants that have escaped from the gardens nearby
I’m definitely guilty of taking pictures of more “charismatic” species like butterfly-bush (and red valerian, which I’ve always loved the shape of) and overlooking “duller” ones - but then, who isn’t?
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No species list is embarrassing! It just shows what we like making sightings of :D
My own top species are an odd mix of common species and species that I enjoy taking photos of - so there are fairly typical things like gulls and frogs, and ‘atypical’ things like mantises and phasmids (although really they are still very common).
I think it’s quite telling that I’m the top observer for 5 of these taxa (6 if you don’t count QG), sometimes by an embarrassing amount!!
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My top is a bean clam, despite the fact that most of my observations of them come from a singular trip
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By far I am a birder with some failing attempts at basic botany and entomology so it makes sense that American Avocets are at my top. My #2 is Mallard which also makes sense when I think about how I live in an urban environment and being in coastal SoCal I have a lot of bodies of water for those species to reside in. As for the American Avocets my excuse is that there were a ton of very cute babies at my local wildlife sanctuary. And who can say no to that little guy…(https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/124958251)
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Ohh, this is fun - little surprising 8 out of my top 10 are orchids. Not sure if that is embarassing - but when I visited my parents in Europe they kept making fun of me for stopping at every orchid along the road. For them orchids are something weird - the German language actually has an expression called “Orchideenfach”, literally “orchid subject”, which is used to mean university courses that are very esoteric and have at most 5 or so students sign up for them 
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I don’t know about embarrassing, but in my top 10 list there are 6 lichens, 1 liverwort, 1 fungus with perennial fruiting bodies and 2 plants. Most of them are found/identifiable throughout the year and, as I tend to travel around, I just pin a species at a new locality. Xanthoria parietina and Urtica dioica (first and last one of my top10) might be embarassing somewhat, though, I admit.
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Hmmm.
Yeah. This checks out. Totally fine with this. It’s hard not to develop a fondness for species you see everyday, and if it’s specific individuals that makes it more personal at least to me. In my opinion this selection isn’t embarrassing.
What IS embarrassing though is the fact that it’s Ospreys that are my top observed species and not my usernamesake. Ahh well… perhaps I can use that motivation to photograph more of my true #1? 
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No embarrassment here. I just like spiders and things that jump! I have so many Brown widows around the house that I was able to donate a whole lot to some researchers a while ago. The husband was only slightly surprised to arrive home to some strangers lying under our outside table.
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This is really interesting to see what other people favour!
Maybe it’s embarrassing that out of 10 species there are 4 drab looking grey moths. But I started last autumn getting into moths by checking lit facades and shop windows and I wanted to document every individual i saw. ;-)
No. 3 stonechats always pose so nicely and I can’t resist them.
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I am slowly trying to work thru those, on my weekly hikes. The same old same old doesn’t seem worth the effort, but, really - at least the first token one. And an easy way to up the species count on my life list.
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