A number of years ago, before I was on iNat, I could hear trilling noises coming from the treetops on my property, but it was dark and I couldn’t see anything. I contacted Lang Elliot, who asked me for a recording. Based on the recording and where I live, he identified the trilling as coming from a Davis’s tree cricket. They’re very hard to see in the dark and often move quickly before you can get a photo of them. Am I permitted to post the Davis’s tree cricket on my account and post a note using Lang as the authority?
If you still have your recording and still know the date and location when you made it, you can upload that audio file as an observation on your account. It is not necessary for the observation to have taken place after you joined iNat – many people have observations that pre-date their iNat account.
The important thing is that it should be your own experience, not someone else’s; and it should be your own photo or audio of that organism, not someone else’s photo or audio of an individual that you believe is the same species.
Whether you upload it with the expert’s ID or with a more general ID and a note is your decision. Other iNat users evaluating the ID should do so based on the evidence in the recording, not on the expertise of someone else.
Yes! We’d like to hear it.
If you don’t have the recording, you can still post the observation. But then it will be what iNat calls a “casual observation.” These can still be valuable even though they won’t get the iNat “research grade” label, which isn’t a big deal IMO.
I took @rondaroaring to mean they were going to post the recording, but on re-reading, maybe not. In that case you are correct.
If you do make an observation with the recording, post a link to it here.
Janet is right, we would like to hear it!
If you have a recording, you can absolutely post that! If you don’t have any uploadable evidence, you can still post it, but it would have to be marked as Casual- “an expert told me that’s what this is”, though a perfectly good way for you to ID things, isn’t in itself a piece of evidence.
Thanks, everyone. I’ll look for the recording or try to make a new one.