I created this topic just five days ago, and today a large snapping turtle showed up in my yard in our teeny tiny little creek that dries up in the summer. https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/23026471 I’ve seen snapping turtles around, but only by the pond. To get here, that turtle had to have crossed several hundred yards of gravel, gone around a cliff, across a busy road. Yet there he was. He was gone within a few hours, but now I find myself watching my step to make sure I don’t trip over any snappers in my yard!
My problem is that I don’t know what is unexpected, so nothing is really a surprise (ok I would be surprised if I found a polar bear :-), I expect that all the things I find are known to be here and can be identified by somebody, and I just have to ask. So I am surprised, to say the least, when I observe two species which have probably been here all along (indigenous) but no one has yet recorded …
https://inaturalist.org/journal/tony_wills/18799-the-hunt-for-the-missing-puffball
Where I am living now, I see giant black squirrels pretty frequently. But the first time I saw one, years ago, was when a full grown one ran down a pole about a foot and a half from me right in the middle of central Kuala Lumpur. I didn’t even know giant squirrels existed. Needless to say, I was pretty confused.
I was out looking for moths one night and I found a “something” sitting on a shovel handle at my parents’. I had no clue what is was, but I submitted it to iNat and Bugguide and found out it was a forcepfly. I didn’t even know they existed.
I’ve always wanted to see a Harvester butterfly. Last summer I was helping my mom clean up the yard when one fluttered past under the old beech and perched on an azalea. My guess is that they’ve always been in my parents’ yard–I just never noticed before. :)
Neat! And love the ‘rabbit puddle’! Often some of my more interesting observations (at least to me) are the traces of life doing it’s thing. In https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/21749216 is an observation of some sort of rodent burrows under the snow. I find them, and the fact that the melting was just correct to expose them, fascinating.
I haven’t made any wild ‘discoveries’, but I snapped a photo of this (https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17772240) in the late Fall, assuming it was a Hairy or Downy woodpecker. I had one eye on the dog as well, and it flew off. I only realised what it was when I processed the picture. This is at the northern part of it’s range, and a bit late for migration. Not a new species, but interesting all the same.
One of my most unexpected finds was not in real life, but in a photo I thought I was taking of Phyllachne. When I later looked at the shot, I found a wee little sundew! Both shots are cropped - the sundew was hiding in the lower left corner :-)
The little polychaete that I discovered (see https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/the-unexpected-finds/2312/22?u=tony_wills) was when I was photographing sea anemones, and after taking a shot I looked at the replay screen and saw something in the background that I thought was a little seed with stripes that I had seen before on land. Then when trying to get a better photo I saw it open out and realised it was something more interesting. So I often take my time when examining observations, looking for the unexpected :-)
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