How do you manage time while looking for wildlife?

Nature Talk
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This especially applies to when you are traveling. Sometimes you have multiple targets in mind, and you want to make the most of your trip. But some will be harder to find than others? Do you go for the easy targets first for the instant gratification? How long do you wait around in one spot? When do you know to cut your losses? In general, how much do you worry about this?

When it’s local, it’s not too bad since you can go the next day. But it can also apply if you are busy all week and only get one day off.

This will probably vary depending on the location, but what is your general strategy?

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I would like to say that I do the smart thing and target biodiverse habitats rather than focusing on individual species…

Edit: My personal value wants me to choose to maximize the number of new species observed so by “smart thing” I mean the “smart thing to meet my personal goals”. That said I often choose poorly for those goals by targeting a few highly desirable species and forgetting the thing I claim to value.

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I’m sorry, it’s not smart to want to look for something specific? Sometimes I am traveling, and there are a couple specific things I want to see that don’t necessarily overlap in habitat, but exist in a close enough distance from each other to plausibly see both. I don’t see what’s not smart about wanting to strategically look for as many of the things I specifically want to see as possible.

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What I usually do is get a list of species I really would like to see and then where they are on the map, whenever I get to a trail or other location, i will search for lets say the top 3 species i want to see in that location, but also take note of anything else new that i see. If the target is something I am unlikely to see just by walking around and is relatively rare despite being seen in the area, I will tend to not focus on it specifically, but rather finding everything in the habitat itself and hoping i just run across it. (e.g. with snakes, lizards, etc).

If its a sedentary species or something i could easily find without much effort, I will focus on it. It all just depends on the species you are looking for, the area in general, etc. If I know I won’t have a ton of time at a site(maybe 10 minutes or less) I will go search for the species I really want to find there first and foremost and disregard everything else, generally. which probably isnt the best way to do things, but its how i do it.

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Well first of all, always try to do research on your target animal(s) before hand, so that you can search in the right areas.

In my opinion, it would probably be better to go for the easiest things first, though it depends how much you want to see the rarer things. As for how long to stay in a spot, it normally depends on how much time I have. For example, I would spend less time searching for the more common targets, so I could have more time to find the rarer ones. Now as always, some days I just don’t have much luck, and unfortunately, that usually requires coming back as often as possible to a location.

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There are a couple different factors for me.
-If I an animal is the #1 thing I want to see above all else, like it is endemic to the area and I can’t get there easily, that will usually become priority.
-If I have multiple targets, and I’m not particularly confident my #1, I may not prioritize it as much. This is especially true if I have not been to that specific habitat before, and there are a lot of species I haven’t seen regardless.
-Also, if the easy species is on the way versus out of the way, it might be better to stop for the instant gratification just so you don’t have to worry about it later.
-Another thing to consider if a species is more crepuscular, or likely to be scared of later in the day when more people show up, it is better to focus on it during the time of day it’s most likely.

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If that was the case, then my research beforehand would include finding out if there are local guides with a good record of showing that species to visitors.

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I am currently in the planning phase of this years annual leave. I have selected Ecuador for this years location (Last year I did Peru and the previous Colombia) I am in the process of knocking out South America one country per year.

I am planning seven weeks, which in my travel style allows me to stay at seven different places (Including travel between places). I look to select places that I expect to be the most biodiverse so primarily look for remote locations, and hopefully primary forest.

A week in any location allows for weather and such. What I do on any given day depends, I will consider any options around the base accomodation. But most nights I will try and do a night walk + put out the moth sheet. Each of the locations I try to have somewhat spread around the country. But generally look for forested zones.

I have a simple challenge of becoming the person in the country I visit with the highest number of observed species of harvestmen. This is easy, because so few people are looking for them, but also hard, because its likely that a large number of the species I am seeing arent described species yet. I am no1 in peru, and tied 1 in colombia.

My hope is, that once I get to number one, more and more people will recognise how awesome they are, and go out and beat me.

Whilst my trip is mostly “see what I see” I often have one specific target. This year its the Bunny Harvestman (Neokayania bicolumnata) https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/1485976-Neokayania-bicolumnata

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Time management in wild spaces feels a bit alien. I go places to see what’s there. What are the habitats, plants, and animals in a place? How is it different from similar habitats that I’ve visited? I’m not stamp collecting and I don’t do status surveys. I spend as much time as I can if I’m comfortable and don’t have somewhere else I need to be.

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When I’m looking locally, I try to bring with me everything I’ll need (including drinking water, snack, bug spray, spare batteries, etc.) so that fatigue is the only thing that decides when I’m done. Sometimes other things happen to shorten the outting (a particularly violent thunderstorm comes to mind…), but usually it’s when I run out of stamina.

When I was new to my area, I would always use the iNat app to “explore” “my location” before going out each time, to see what others had found recently, to have goals, and also to learn where to go (before I learned a lot of the local trails). Even when I had “goal” sightings I would still creep along to try to see all I could find along the route, often times becoming the first to post a particular species here, which was fun (and not too difficult since there weren’t a lot of iNatters in this spot).

This past May I went on my first trip to other countries since learning of iNat. Before going, I used iNat to explore those countries, filtering for the time of year I’d be there, to see what was there and get ideas of “goal” sightings. But, this was not an iNat only trip, and with only a couple of exceptions, involved traveling to different locales every day (12 days total, 3 countries). I settled on having the mentality that just about anything I saw would be “new” to me, even if it was only new by virtue of it being the first (perhaps only) I’d see in that country. How much time I had to search when we got to a new location was based on how far we had to travel that day and what we planned to do while there. I would just get all I could before time was up. As a generalist, I did try to get as much variety as I could wherever we were. (I had hoped to see a basking shark, but knew that since I wouldn’t be in a boat, I probably wouldn’t get so lucky…but while hopefully scanning the ocean from a clifftop, I got a jellyfish sighting instead!) For me, just being open to all I could get in those foreign lands for the short time I was there ended up being a good strategy. I saw a lot of things I hadn’t expected, I even got a cuckoo wasp (which is something I always hope to see wherever I go). It ended up being a good balance of iNatting and being a sightseer/traveler. I just made sure I was aware of how much time I had for it, and when half of that time was up, it was time to turn around and head to the car! I also asked my husband to let me know when it was time to move on if I did happen to get carried away and lose track of time, as a backup, but mostly I kept myself in line. (-: (I got 513 observations of 291 species (only 246 obs/164 species of which are RG, so the species count can change).)

If I ever get to do an iNat-only trip abroad, it will be back to stamina, weather, circumstances as the time manager! :grinning_face:

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There’s probably a thousand books out there that advise on time management and I bet none of them address how to do it when looking for organisms. In many cases the species you seek will determine how much time you devote to finding it. If I know a certain bird is in an area but I’m not having any luck photo’ing it I might give it 10 minutes to show up before I move on. Doing the prep work is helpful — have a few target species, know where they most likely will be present and when, and be patient. I’ve definitely become more patient after I took up wildlife photography as a hobby.

Also, some of my best encounters with organisms in the wild were purely by chance and had nothing to do with planning. Which is part of the fun.

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Is there anything you particularly want to see? Seek it out. If not, just observe and appreciate what’s there. If you’re running around just checking boxes, you’re not going to have a very good time. Nature doesn’t exist to be collected and checked off - may as well just have some gratitude for what you do get to see.

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I didn’t imply to mean choosing differently was dumb. I have added an edit to my original comment that clarifies my thought process.

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I manage time by NOT looking for wildlife, even though it’s my favourite thing.

There are only 24 hours in a day. Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource.

Every hour that you spend iNatting, takes an hour away from something that might be more important. Time triage. Priorities!

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This brings to mind something that was on my mind a few days ago. One of iNaturalist’s stated goals is connecting people with nature. But as several ongoing or recent threads suggest, connecting people with nature can be overshadowed by… connecting people with iNaturalist.

There have been articles written about “selfie culture,” meaning the tendency among some digital natives to make their lives too much about their social media activities. “If you didn’t post it to Instagram, it didn’t happen.” We saw this in another thread just today:

Well… I’m a Gen Xer. I was already well into adulthood when social media became a thing, but does that mean that my childhood and youth didn’t happen? I have lots of valid memories of experiences which not only will never be posted to social media, but maybe nobody present had a camera either. The time I saw a Resplendent Quetzal at the edge of the Costa Rican cloud forest, I only had a simple point-and-shoot camera which I knew would not succeed in photographing the bird in the canopy. That was a good thing: it meant that instead of focusing on getting a shot, I focused on enjoying the moment.

Tying this back to the original question: sometimes, I manage time while looking for wildlife by not thinking about making a “record” of it. Am I going to forego an awesome birding trip because I don’t have a telephoto camera? Nope! Am I going to look away from the birds to photograph weeds for iNat observations? Nope! Time management means evaluating which aspect of an experience is most important to you, and cutting out the less important parts.

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https://youtu.be/JfjkiTB1fHQ?si=T0giYZ0XSr1QF9gi

:up_arrow: Sean Penn photographing snow leopards, and NOT taking a photo. Staying present in the moment.

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Wow, you took my quote so blatantly out of context, it is almost insulting.

My comment was not about Instagram or any other Social Media platform but about my personal map, which is stated at the beginning of the sentence even, and is more compareable of people marking spots they have been to on oversized worldmap on their bedroom wall. It is not driven by showing off to others, it is born from an completeist mindset which has been present before the internet as well (yes, I also grew up without it, who figured) and just manifested itself differently back then.. just how I am wired and others aren’t. Easy to get jugdemental about it or offended by a false recieved claim that your youth did not happen..

Also your dichotomy is not correct here “either be like that or enjoy nature”. .. aha. I do not even feel like I really need to adress this, or do I?

And lastly to your fear

Again, why this either or mentallity? Someone who maybe did not care about lifeforms in certain places before can now start looking around at pitstops or along away to get their observations.. which they would not have done otherwise. Nothing lost in that moment..

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Now who’s taking things out of context? Nothing in that sentence implied an either or mentality. But, like any social media, iNaturalist can be used as a means of connection (as Facebook originally was for me because my family members who don’t live nearby are on it) or as an end in itself (as Facebook has tried to become by flooding me with “recommended” posts from groups that I don’t know).

To put it another way, going iNatting can be a means of connecting with nature; but it can also be a goal in itself. And of course, there is a spectrum of these elements, so, no, not either or. But shades of gray do not disprove the existence of black and white.