Species you struggle to ID

As the title implies, what are some species you have trouble ID’ing? Maybe ones with very few distinguishing features, ones that are usually hidden, or ones that look very similar to others? If you’ve had this problem, how did you figure it out?

Personally I find myself struggling to tell some of the geometer moths apart. I’ve spotted what I suspect might be bent-line grays or Canadian melanolophia moths before but I’m still feeling a bit unsure about them and I have yet to get any feedback on the posts which isn’t helping. How do you know a “bent-lined gray” isn’t actually a brown shaded gray?(https://www.inaturalist.org/taxa/222284) Or that an unadorned carpet moth isn’t secretly a bent-lined carpet? Moths are great and I still love them but these little guys make my life difficult at times :/

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Laughing dove and mourning dove

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I struggle to tell the difference between certain bearded proteas, for example Protea neriifolia, Protea laurifolia, etc. The wild hybrids certainly don’t help!

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I have difficulty with the sessile-flowered trilliums of the eastern United States. I can identify T. recurvatum, T. lancifolium, and T. stamineum with confidence, and recently I’ve made some progress with T. sessile, T. discolor, T. viride, and T. viridescens, but the remaining ten species continue to be very difficult to identify.

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For whatever reason, I have the hardest time ID’ing bumble bees (Bombus). I’ve read a bunch of guides, looked at a bunch of pictures… yeah I can’t see the differences between a lot of species. I can tell apart a Common Eastern and an American, sure, but do I know that it’s actually a Common Eastern and not a Brown-belted or some other species? Nope, not a clue.

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My problem exactly! With European species, that is. Although bombus are certainly among my absolute favorite things, I just can’t tell them apart. Bombus terrestris (" buff-tailed bumblebee") and Bombus lucorum (“white-tailed bumblebee”) are worst. I’ve been told they actually look different on the British isles, but the continent fellows are absolutely same-tailed bumblebees really.

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I have been working on bees lately and absolutely there are some that are a struggle. I have been thinking of reverting to my old biology study days and start pencil drawing and labelling what I have seen so that I concentrate more on what is there.

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Those things with leaves and flowers (sometimes).

The common yellow ones, we used to call them LYCs — little yellow composites. Starting to learn those finally.

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Is there a dove called “laughing dove”?

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Is there a dove called “laughing dove”?

Yes, there is! iNaturalist page on this species

This species is very common in Africa across the Middle East into India. There’s an introduced population in Western Australia as well.

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So far the most difficult critters are certain insects and spiny lizards. In some cases I was able to suggest the name of a species but they haven’t been confirmed by other users yet. Here are few examples:

https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/84990691
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86088150
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86083065

The spiny lizards are driving me crazy. Apparently you cannot identify them accurately unless you perform an autopsy or DNA testing. So what about all the websites that I saw about lizards that have the names of different species of spiny lizards? Are they all wrong?

For instance, I thought that this one
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/86181803
was a plateau fence lizard bur another user disagreed with me.

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we also have a Nother Pink Erica. And a daunting array of yellow daisies, in all sizes, from don’t step on it! to over your head with a sturdy trunk.

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Sceloporus of the S. undulatus complex in the US Southwest are tough. You can’t tell them apart morphologically and many geographic areas lack genetic sampling so can’t say definitively which of 2 or 3 species is present. There may be areas of overlap and/or hybridization. Just a difficult group.

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Young pipits and partially young wheatears, why can’t birds just be different?
Canadian Goldenrod and Giant goldenrod, of course if people would stop planting them, both wouldn’t be agressive invasives and I wouldn’t need to id them!
Of course many moths and Poaceae were created to trick people too.

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I always say that moths oughta have bar codes on their hind wings. :-)

(For folks in this region, check out Moths of the Eastern US and Canada on FB - a great resource.)

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It’s cottontail rabbits for me. I can generally tell it’s in the genus Sylvilagus but even when looking at the ranges I have a lot of trouble.

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Some sympatric Asian species of Oxyopes (especially females) are essentially impossible to ID without examining genitals (O. birmanicus, O. lineatipes, O. sertatus, O. javanus)

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Perhaps following the “dunning kruger effect curve” [Google it], I am getting less confident about many identifications!

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I struggle with finding an ID for many of the more obscure scale insects and mealy bug species.

I find that the Computer Vision is quite good on a lot of the small inconspicuous moths.

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It’s my belief that no one actually knows the ID’s of Geometridae ! Moths are a difficult bunch (for the unitiated, how on earth can you deal with something like this - Moth Photographers Group – Euxoa ochrogaster – 10801 (msstate.edu)). I have been wrong with Amphipyrinae so may times that I’ve stopped trying to ID them. I ID mostly other Canadian Noctuidae, and the best advice I can offer is repetition. After a while you develop a sense of key features, which species are highly variable, which are not and what to do with that information. Some moths can only be told apart through dissection or range. Use multiple sources to get a sense of variation, go by descriptions if possible, and in the end, ask for help!

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