I have the interest, have some time, but don’t have the patience. At least when months pass with no ID for a high-quality photo.
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What’s a fynbos group?
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I heard about iNat in 2015 or 2016 during an early flush of myco-curiosity, and set up an account in 2019 (“is this really an adorable native wildflower in a construction site, or is it the cute neo-natal form of an invasion force?”). I got a correct ID almost immediately, which probably spoiled me; my next observation attempts weren’t as successful and I gave up.
In late 2022, looking for a way to log things I’d seen, rather than ask questions, I actually read some Getting Started documentation and tried again. The power of RTFM is truly amazing.
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Have you tried picking thru the leaderboard for a location or taxon specialist to @mention?
I live in Cape Town. South-Western Cape has one of the world’s 6 floral kingdoms. All to itself. Which is why we won the City Nature Challenge the first year we entered. From Table Mountain down to the Atlantic Ocean gives us lots of biodiversity. Fynbos is a Dutch word and I can only imagine the despair of early botanists - all these shrubs, with small leaves!
Try this - he writes well and shares his knowledge in a bite sized portion
https://thefynbosguy.com/fynbos-diversity-strength-in-numbers/
I find the forum more useful. How do I …? But, WHY, doesn’t …?
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I like how it starts with comparison with Northern European areas, like, pretty much any place wins in biodiversity with areas that just recently got rid of the glacier, lets compare pre-Ice Age Europe. Like, Volga had magnolias growing on its shores before.)
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Friend kept telling me I’d like it. I finally tried it, uploading some cave life. At first I was just kinda putting up older cave bio photos but a few months later I got really into it when I decided to ID literally everything on the plot of land we got. Still a work in progress of course. Then I started a mushroom special interest and so I do our mushroom society’s yearly challenge too. Then I started to ID for others as well. It snowballed, haha!
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At first all I did was identify mollusk observations for other people – the observations of species I knew at any rate.
It must have been quite a few weeks before I started making any of my own observations.
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I uploaded instantly quite a bunch, as this was the reason for joining iNat.
IDing took a while longer, as it feels a bit intimidating at first… now IDing is my main activity here
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Saying another number after the count number instead of word seems like it would get confusing
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Depends which way you were taught to count 2 seconds.
We are sitting here saying why That Word which is so hard for us to spell?
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I wasn’t suggesting anyone outside the US would use Mississippi. Maybe hippopotamus, which I had to look up the spelling for. Anyway you don’t need to know how to spell it to say it.
I remember how to spell Mississippi by singing a little song in my head when I write it: em eye-es-es eye-es-es eye-pee-pee eye.
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I grew up in the United States and while I’m familiar with counting by using “One Mississippi, two Mississippi …” I also learned the pattern “One one-thousand, two one-thousand …” which isn’t all that different from what @dianastuder mentioned.
While you may not have been suggesting anyone outside the US use Mississippi I do find it humorous that you then propose hippopotamus in its place rather than accepting that other cultures/countries may do things differently. 
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I have no problem with how other people do it. I really like learning about other cultures. I just said that using numbers SEEMS like it would be confusing TO ME. I was suggesting hippopotamus to whomever hasn’t learned any other way to do it before (and speaks English). NOT as an alternative to however you already learned it. I have also heard it as “one thousand” but prefer “Mississippi”.
PS I said “would use” not “should use” as in I wouldn’t expect anyone outside the USA to already use “Mississippi”. Or would want to use it if they didn’t already have a way.
PPS Maybe I should have said “insinuating” or “implying” instead of “suggesting”
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I joined May 26, 2020. I took my first photo intended for an iNat observation June 15, 2020 and submitted it on July 4, 2020. Very pandemic, but I can’t imagine NOT using iNaturalist now. I have never used the phone app and can’t imagine using it because it offers so much less than the website.
My struggles with iNaturalist (which I have spoken about before in this forum) were because it is such a massive and powerful site and definitely NOT intuitive - so a lot of stumbling around to try to figure things out. The introductory tutorial was not very helpful for me because I just want to know about the things in my backyard andI take pictures with my phone and the tutorial is aimed at people who travel to places specifically to take pictures of wildlife and have expensive camera equipment. It took a long time before I understood why I might want to read and comment on the forum.
I wasn’t actually harmed by all the stumbling around, but I am a persistent person. I joined because I wanted to get smarter about the world around me, and all the stumbling and fumbling definitely made me feel stupid. The people on the forum are amazing and wonderful, so it was not their fault, I just was not able to anticipate the complexity of this website and was not used to not being able to figure out a website.
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I started using iNat in 2017 because I was searching for a tool to help with wildflower IDs. My observations increased over the next few years. I very quickly realized that there were experts helping to provide IDs. I recall telling people about the app, saying that the it helps you ID, and then experts come along and make sure it is right.
At some point I started to wonder if I was observing so much that it might be annoying to the experts helping with IDs. Then I got a message from a researcher asking for participation on a project, followed by some announcements about bioblitzes. That made me even more enthusiastic and realize that I probably wasn’t observing too much. Last year in a single 4 day bioblitz, I observed as much as I had in entire years previously.
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It is most definitely a long learning curve at first. I stumbled for the first year or so, then bits started to click into place. But people who have been active for years (me included) still bob up on the forum - oh - I never knew you could do that!! The website is dense with unexplored corners, and is used in MANY different ways.
My list of URLs harvested from forum answers grows longer and longer.
32 for IDs (including 8 from CNC23 till they are cleared), and 24 archived links for info.
PS update your profile - you have over 1K IDs brava!
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About newbies who are cautious before their first ID.
iNat needs to make observers aware that Identifiers are
NOT a paid team of widely informed biologists poised at a call centre waiting alertly for your obs to land.
Some identifiers ARE - I am working on the taxonomy of Ladybird bugs. Or biologists keeping their own slice of iNat tidy.
But most are middling identifiers are like me, interested with good intentions and learning every day. iNat needs a Nanny like this (paid) forum to encourage observers (especially the hundreds and thousands of) to start identifying. The freshly accumulated backlog from CNC23 is horrifying for those of us who are plodding along clearing the beach. One. Grain. Of Sand - wait, what’s that, Shell Lady? At a time.
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I’m sure you know I was including you in the “amazing and wonderful” category!
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And because iNat … after you ‘felt stupid’ when trapped on that initial learning curve. The next thing I read is a botany prof who came back when she had some time to dedicate to her learning curve.
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Not really. I learned it as “one-thousand.” Counting seconds as: one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand… I never got confused.
I learned that song, too, only it tended to add letters. If I wrote it the way I sang it, it would come out as Mississsipppi. The first doubling is just unconsciously keeping the rhythm: m-i-s-s, followed by the same cadence for i-s-s-s. Four notes, with the first note accented, just sounds right. Not sure where the extra “p” comes from, though, unless it’s because the last “i” again feels accented.
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