When I am actively engaged observing nature… I am ageless. there are none of the niggling thoughts, or the aches or other physical maladies that mark my days… until I disengage, setting off several reality reminders, like the dizziness of Benign paroxysmal positional vertigo, by standing too fast or simply looking up, or the returning of blood circulation from squatting… then I feel darn close but not quite all of my chronological age.
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In many ways, and I suspect I’m not alone here, escaping the grownup ‘baggage’ was what made me (as a young kid) head into the woods almost every chance I could get.
And that’s what probably brought me back to this habit, so many decades later (with a big nudge from the Covid outbreak, of course).
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I love the introspective turn this thread has taken, from how old are you chronologically, to how old do you feel
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Jeez, going through this thread makes me realism how young I am. Welp, at least I become twelve this year.
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Very amusing tangent.
As a young person who stills clearly remembers most of his childhood I think these kinds of people are best avoided at any age 
Kinda funny how much iNat has helped me develop into a naturalist, which goes to show my youth lol
Just out of interest, is it possible to graph votes over time? I admit I expected this to be a relatively ‘one and done’(?) thing, where anyone who was willing to vote would do so in the first week or so - but it just keeps going up. That then makes me curious as to how the percentages have changed over time…
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The 40s have gone up but the 50s still languish.
But the forum users are a very small slice of iNatters.
And you are not even required to be on / use iNat. The forum to open to all.
I’m about as young as you can be here. However, I don’t let that change things. I try to consistently add ID’s and help run bird and butterfly walks in my county.
The amount of times I’ve been told people thought I was in my 30s-50s before I met them or in my way of conduct is concerning. I’m not sure if that is a good thing or not 
I’m getting older and even though I’m still extremely young I find myself wishing I was younger.
My biggest takeaway is that people often want to know your experience and use that to gauge your level of expertise. I find this false in most situations. (The following example is not dissing anyone rather portraying an example based on the way things are.) I help run a NWR International Shorebird Survey every month in Florida and I often have people triple my age with triple my experience asking for identification help. The only reason I get to this point is because I spend hours of my free time studying guides and literature. Every moment I spend doing this doubles the information I would get from “experience”. Therefore, everyone new to this sort of thing do not get discouraged and work with vigilance, eventually you will be fully caught up. (unless you are my backlog :D)
I don’t want to make it sound like experience isn’t worth anything - that’s far from the truth, but someone with 3 years of experience with minimal research vs. someone with 1 year of experience who does 3 hours of research every day, one is clearly going to have better results. So essentially what it comes down to is the hard earned work you are willing to put in. That, as a youth, is something most people my age aren’t willing to do. Experience without work is very little experience with work is everything.
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My public libraries are unfortunately not this way. People who do not agree with their way of thinking are shunned and treated disrespectfully. Same way with the books that the librarians do not like or align with. It is rather unfortunate. However, it isn’t all bad and some of the librarians are great people. I think birding festivals and other outdoor get-togethers portray this the best.
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Don’t blame the librarians, blame your governor, your state legislature and a certain politico-religious faction.
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You’d be surprised how much the opposite that actually is if you visited the library.
Just a personal observation from an older dude. You go through stages in life where confidence in your knowledge will change. I think there’s a graph on some Forum thread that illustrates that. I thought I was pretty knowledgeable in my early adulthood, then as I got older I realized how much I didn’t know. Now that I’m even older, I view most things in life based on what I think I know but leave room for new information that might change my views. That even applies to biology and nature study which I’ve spent a lifetime doing but fully accept there’s an awful lot I’m ignorant about. That probably influences some of my IDing on iNat where I might be less quick to correct someone’s ID based on possibility that I missed something.
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So we’ve gone from celebrating diversity of opinion/setting aside differences to enjoy our common interests in this thread to trashing “politico-religious factions”…
I’m not gonna jump into the library discussion, but just had to point out the irony there
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Yes, thank you for setting that example, and let’s all please stay on the topic of age diversity (however measured) among Forum participants.
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There’s almost 300 voters now!
I am a librarian. But not a public library - university libraries in Cape Town and Zurich. We had restricted access at both for valuable antiquarian books and manuscripts.
But the tightest restriction - locked in a cage - was a collection of porn and erotica in Zurich. About 40 years ago - so that has surely changed meanwhile.
South Africa has a happy history of knee jerk banning, similar to what USA has tipped into now. Black Beauty?! which I had read as a child long before the powers that be went crazy.
We do. But one of the wonderful things about iNat is that identifiers are all treated as equal. ‘Age is just a number’ but do you know that taxon, do you?? You have just published the new taxonomy of … = 1 vote. You have studied dragonflies in your leisure hours for decades = 1 vote. First year biology student floundering along (Diana horrified to realise that others can tell different sp of gull apart, there are spp of gulls 
= 1 vote. Landed on iNat yesterday and full of newbie enthusiasm = 1 vote.
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Thank you for pointing that out, I apologize for engaging in it politically.
Yes! This is what I meant. My library has banned books like Peter Pan and I even think the Hunger Games?!
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I agree with you as much as I can, I certainly don’t have the experience though 
One thing I have seen is that the more you think you don’t know really shows how much you do know. The humble approach no matter how hard is always the better approach.
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This poll is really interesting. Thx for doing it. I’m thinking 60s are tied with 40s due to retirement but also because genx is so small.
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