I hate making a mistake in an ID. It’d be nice to just be magically right all of the time, but every time I make an ID I risk making a mistake. So, while I’m always annoyed to find out I wasn’t right it’d be much worse if some error I made just… sat there being wrong and no one saying a word about it.
I also love correcting other people. I know this is a little peevish, so I try to be nice about it as possible but I love finding some error everyone else missed. It’s delightful.
I’m a teacher, and I’ve observed that it’s impossible to learn without making mistakes and then correcting them. Sometimes I feel I just don’t have the right kind of “eyes” to spot the differences between these ants. (For example Tetramorium immigrans vs. Tetramorium tsushimae ) But, I’ve only been doing this for a few months and I think I’m getting better at it.
But there are times when I’ve been reading keys and field guides and things blend together and then it’s time for a break. Do those of you who have been doing IDs for years feel like you get better at it? I assume the answer is “yes” but some reassurance would be nice.
One way to reassure yourself, is to find a reason to work thru your older IDs. Down the years I look at those obs with fresh eyes, now I can recognise A, B and C – then they were all dumped in a broad ID – where I find the poor things still sitting waiting in the queue of millions …
Your interest in ants means you can pick over what waits in Insecta, and push them to – gets a good and fine ID tomorrow.
Oh, yes. Yes, yes, yes. Sometimes I even learn that I often make certain mistakes (Yellow-rumped vs. Magnolia Warblers, for example) and so I don’t make those IDs, at least not without pulling out the field guides.
And if it’s any consolation, the best biologists and naturalists I know make mistakes now and then and they are usually quite cheerful about being corrected (if they’re cranky about it, I smile sweetly and move away). Plus, the more I hang out with true experts, the more I hear them say things like, “Well, I just don’t know. It doesn’t fit the keys, but then the keys aren’t always perfect either. Let’s leave it at the genus, shall we?”
But I do get better over time, I think. Better at whatever my new obsession is, at least (bryophytes), but I lose my abilities with older obsessions at the same time (odonates).
“There are no mistakes, only lessons.” Robin Sharma.
Despite the fact that neurologists tell us we have billions of neurons in our brain, I have long realized that my information shelves seem to be full after so many years of identifying things. Nowadays, as I strive to learn a new group of organisms (e.g. lichen moths or aquatic Crambid moths), some group I was formerly facile at identifying gets bumped off the shelf, like Odonates (…Lynn) or Confusing Yellow Composites or …
If I understand the way memory works, I think I need a new hippocampus. Anyone got a spare one they can loan me? I didn’t see any on Amazon.
I am either becoming an expert or loosing my marbles because I say “I don’t know” a lot more often than before. I used to be more confident before learning bits and pieces.
When I identify something I am either right or learn from a correction. Win either way. Correcting someone is different. Getting it wrong and backtracking is plain embarrassing.
Memory works like a bed. When there are “Ten in a bed”, just call “Roll over! Roll over!” and suddenly there is more room.
Ooph, I recently went through my county and “unreviewed” all the plants to go through them again, well the unreviewed from subphylum up. There are several I’ve looked at an old ID and realized I completely missed the mark. Or I’ll ID something without slowing down a bit, IDing it as an ant when it is a termite. I always appreciate the correction, even if at first my response is closer to the “I couldn’t have gotten it wrong”. Its humbling.
Yes, when I realise a record made years ago is a first for the county or just first for a reserve, I worry I got it wrong. I could spend hours finding the specimen, and the relief when it turns out to be correct is much better than the pleasure in making a new record. And if it turns out to be wrong, that can make me consider giving up natural history, especially if it has been published somewhere so it will keep resurfacing no matter how many people I explain the error to.
What is also infuriating is when I have made a good record but I have passed it on to, say, a local records centre, and they have entered the wrong species in their database and then that has got published, e,g, Chara curta, Great Glemham, 2001. What I actually recorded was Chalcoides aurata.