Well, for me, I am used to walking and bicycling a lot. I don’t have a car or know how to drive. A lot of my recent observations are on 20-40 mile bicycle trips.
Riding a mile on a bicycle is pretty easy for me. But, scanning my surroundings, braking, hopping off, getting into position for say, a Red-Tailed Hawk, and then taking a picture and getting back on my bicycle makes it a lot harder. Its not the energy, it is the process of doing lots of those little mini-motions altogether. It does add up, at least for me.
It is hard for me physically but the rewards are great!
Having had some physical disability for over 30 years (due to Multiple Sclerosis & Arthritis) I’ve had plenty of periods of time when making observations is too physically taxing to be enjoyable or successful.
Re-awakening my interest in native plants, and observing them in my own back yard has had many positive effects. Now i-natting is an important activity for me at home, and on my winter holidays abroad. I’m able to tramp around small hills, on somewhat uneven ground, with a companion for security. I like to think the improvement is mostly due to the joy!
Not as arduous as having to sort all the photos at the end of the day! Especially if you take a lot of photos. Though given I’m picky in ensuring I have at least one useable photo of everything I find, my rate is a bit higher than average…
At the end of a full day of making observations in rugged terrain, I’m exhausted. When I’m backpacking with a couple of cameras and several lenses, it is like doing mini Burpees with weights.
I sometimes wear knee pads to make it easier and more comfortable.
My wife and I are both Mid-70’s. Every Mon-Wed-Fri we go to a local park, wildlife refuge, or nature preserve to walk for an hour or more usually covering about 2 miles. We both carry our Nikons with 500 - 600mm lenses. We log the time/steps as exercise in our fitness tracking program.
It’s not very strenuous but we get a lot of nice pictures of critters, flowers, plants and our 5-Y-O grandson who (occasionally) accompanies us. Other days we can sit on the back porch and watch the feeders in the yard.
Because I’m pretty obsessed with taking low angle shots of stuff when I can, I do a good amount of squatting when I’m out. Doing this at 40 is definitely not as fun as it was when I was 30…
Yeah, one of the many reasons I switched to mirrorless. But I like getting it right down to the level of the subject, so that usually still involves squatting. But not lying down. :-)
and it definitely does not get more fun as the years roll on!
My hiking stick helps me somewhat in rising from squat; but even with that aid, I’m finding it more and more painful and doing it less and less.
I take a monopod for my camera, but inevitably use it more as a walking stick than for stabilising camera… I think I definitely benefit more from stabilising than my camera does!
Oh, yes! When I’m driving I may think, “I should photo that for iNaturalist!” but that would require stopping the car, getting out, standing up, etc. Sometimes also turning the car around and going back. I usually don’t do it. (When I do stop I take a lot of photos.)
I am 72, nearly 73. I tend to kneel or sit instead of squatting, and when I need to get up, I put both hands flat down on the ground to help push me up. If I get to the point where I can’t kneel or sit on the ground, I am not sure what I will do, but because I like very small shells I really do need to get down there, and once down I need to get up again, so hopefully I will find a way to do what I need to do.
The other day, (up in MLK Jr park, actually), I was photographing a water plant, kneeling down, and then as I stood up, I saw a Turkey Vulture, one of the first of the year, soaring overhead, at such an angle that it was passing over me. I tilted my head and torso backwards to get it as it passed overhead. So that is the type of thing that does it to me…not just standing up, but standing up into some weird contortion.
This winter I met other birders and they lifted me to another park, where was a family of friendly beavers, after sitting on knees for like 20 mins, we saw a Goshawk flying by, to photograph it I had to turn torso upwards and to the right, it just happened so that in lumbar I have one vertebra that is very much off its normal place and don’t want to get back no matter what I or my helpers do, unlike other vertebrae, so sitting in cold in a bent position wasn’t the best idea, and then doing that turn with 4 kg camera in hands was even worse, my back was just dying and photos all turned up blurred cause of pain I couldn’d hold my position more than a couple of secs. I hardly could stand, but it wasn’t the end, a girl we met said she found an owl. An old man said he knows everything around and can show us it, but he lead us to the place where we already were that day before photographing beaver, but did it through the longest path (in fact it was hardly a path, but tracks in snow) possible while walking as fast as a human can, for me they all were running, and I couldn’t just ask them to wait, so I had to run after them, my shoes were wet and cold, body hardly working, and we spent like another hour or more runnig around looking up for an owl. The worst was that this man and his friend couldn’t be responsible birders (they had no cameras or anything), they didn’t let us make good shots from a distance that was comfortable for us and the bird, they decided to come through snow closer to it and of course they spooked it, and it was just insane and unethical both to an owl and my organism, cause I didnt sign for that. (to add, I spent 2,5 hours walking at the first place when I was alone, so it all started with me not being in my best shape)
Thinking about days like that, observing is really hard.
I take it you don’t watch fish in shallow creeks. I have been known to don mask and snorkel and lie belly down in a stream so that the water comes up to my forehead.
For me, to the original question of how arduous is observing, it is what I make it. I broke my leg back in 2015 a few months after I had joined and went from a beginner observer/contributor to an armchair virtual observer/identifier. In my recovery phase I used observing to get myself out there again sometimes hobbling on to rocky autumn bluffs to try and capture sightings of rafts of migrating seabirds.
Currently I am recovering from a procedure in early March and am working my way back to normal with iNat as my physical therapy: lugging my equipment; going for forest walks; beach striding; balancing under fallen trees/branches and over seaweed covered rocks and snow covered docks; stooping to get images of tidepool organisms; carefully moving rocks for a 7 year old’s observations; holding back the four year old brother; and just trying to keep up with co-observers.
and it definitely does not get more fun as the years roll on!