as my usual evenings and weekends are fairly busy I log a significant part of my observations during my lunch breaks. It’s about half an hour to an hour time just for myself and thanks to iNat I try to be as productive as possible in that time too.
No seriously, it’s nice to keep yourself occupied with nature and also quite interesting that you can still find new species on your usual promenade routes, even if you’ve walked them daily for years!
Do you also go iNatting during your lunch breaks? If so - what’s the best find that you’ve made there?
Some time ago I moved to flat near forest and almost everyday I use my lunch break for walking and iNatting. I have ALOT of observations from my home area. As for me most interesting are American Mink and White-tailed Eagle
Before I retired, I’d go walking during my lunch break near my office and was often very productive in photo’ing birds, odonates, plants in flower. I got a few new county records for dragonflies and a few rare birds for the area. Almost all my iNat records from Santa Fe, New Mexico are within a mile of my former office.
I certainly do. Sometimes I also identify in my lunch break - especially if, for whatever reason I’m having my lunch at a differnet time to my colleagues and the weather’s not great. I’m also in the habit of identifying over a coffee/breakfast in the canteen for a while before I clock in in the morning. Today I was mainly watching training videos in the morning and when it got to lunchtime I only had one more half-hour video to watch and a short test, so I decided to carry on, eat (packed) lunch at the desk while finishing that, and go exploring with my camera for my break unencumbered by the need to eat.
My best? At a previous workplace a couple of years ago I recorded a hoverfly for which, at the time, iNat had only 6 observations.
Once I was sitting outside with a sandwich on a metal chair when an orchard bee emerged from a hole in the frame where it had been nesting!
For about a year now I’ve been working jobs that give me shifts too short for me to have or really even need a lunch break.
That being said, I did work at a gas station for a time and because our team was so small, I was the only one working for most of my shifts. This allowed me plenty of time to wander during quiet spells with no one around to question it. There’s not much in the way of foliage nearby, but bugs still wandered by fairly often. This culminated in the creation of a project I made to keep all my gas station observations in one place and it’s since grown to nearly 400 members.
Oh my goodness. All the time! I also do some nitrate testing in some of the local waterways (through the Izaak Walton League of America). Found so many cool things, but among my favorites are the baby turtles.
O, yes.
In 2020 I started to make at least one observation per day, and you know, there are so many interesting species around. Especially if you live on the corner between large city and forest.
Yes, transition zones are usually quite rich. You may get some species from the forest, some species from the city and some species that only occur on the forest edges!
Yep. And there are some swamps and springs in forest, there are some open spaces, and so on and so forth.
I’ve checked one thing now. I have 45k observations, and 7k of them (and 1343 species) I’ve made in 1km circle around my home. 16k observations of 2k species I’ve made in 10km area. 31k obs of 2752 species in 100km area.
