I was thinking along the same lines: watch/ look harder etc. and suggest raise the frequency of your outings. I was surprised how much more I found after I had decided in 2021 to go out every day - even though I always frequent the same areas due to not having a car.
https://www.inaturalist.org/stats/2022/susanne-kasimir
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Yes! I think I called it the âbackyard effectâ but your brain will develop very fine-tuned filters to help you find something âdifferentâ in your familiar hunting grounds.
For me, one of the biggest breakthroughs was taking off my glasses â which I generally leave on for field stuff (Iâm slightly myopic) for safety and looking for larger stuff. But for macro-safaris, as soon as I put my specs in my pocket, I could focus on the minutia much, much easier and my hits went way up for little stuff. (Not so good for birds though!).
Iâm also a firm believer in getting into a âtechno-transparentâ zone. That is, developing the skills, and finding the gear and techniques necessary that you do not waste any mental energy about the tech youâre using. Lighter, smaller, easily handled â makes a huge difference. As does cheaper â if like me, youâre less flexible in that area than you wish you were (while browsing photo gear sites) and the thought of losing/damaging gear that would take you years to replace would be a real scary and distracting concern.
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I use inexpensive clip on lenses because I have lost several already. As well as several lens caps when I used my DSLR. Mother Nature will give them back in her own time.
I now wear my glasses with a cord around my neck, after having to look for them too many times. Same thing, I can see closeup better without them, but not good for distance. However, the more I leave them off, the more I force my brain to see better and the weaker my rx gets. Having what I think of as my âidiot stringâ has saved hours of searching. And buying glasses in pairs has helped too.
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Small aquatic life is a fun area of biodiversity thatâs everywhere.
If you put some water and weeds and leaves and sediment in a jar and let it settle, youâll find all kinds of invertebrates in it. Youâll get different diversity depending on whether you get it from a creek, pond, swamp, ocean etc.
If you have a microscope and depression slides you can look at samples of pond water and find various plankton species.
There are a variety of other insect traps, a popular one I know of but havenât tried is the Berlese/Tullgren funnel which is used to find arthropods hidden in leaf litter.
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Oh yeah, I definitely have struggled with this same problem. I once met someone (it was like, 10 years ago) with a new experimental digital lens correction pair of glasses (that were eventually removed from the marketplace) that had a sensor in the handle that would electronically switch the lens focus depending on head angle. But I donât know how well that would work in field photography. Iâm looking up, Iâm looking down. Itâs not a consistent angle. Thatâs why I found the whole string thing too cumbersome (the glasses would always tangle with the camera strap and camera).
Iâd love to see someone develop a secure, easy to switch, off/on kind of solution (other than the string). Maybe a quick-flip up lens system? Hmm⌠I have a brother who designs mobile medical devices. Time to give him a call.
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I paid extra for an eyepiece viewfinder for my DSLR, works on hot shoe, and I could adjust that so I didnât have to remove my glasses. That was probably 15+ years ago, an Olympus. Disability has made me a â phonographer â and my specâsâ string now tangles with my hat string.
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But all current cameras allow you to modify viewfinder for different eyesight, I find it regularly when accidentally touch it and then get confused why itâs so blurry.
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I had the same thought. But they might be talking about an extreme optometrical prescription, and itâs a custom adjuster that was purchased. I know my daughterâs focus would be out of range of most of these adjusters.
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Could those be adjusted to a DSLR? I find it depressing to use phone only because of this problem, I hope there is a solution.
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There are special adapters available for most major camera lines. Hereâs a description from Canon for their line: https://www.eos-magazine.com/articles/viewfinder/dioptric.html
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When I bought that camera the only viewfinder was the screen on the camera back. Thatâs not what stops me from using a DSLR. Iâve become unable to carry one, even with a harness, and my hands have difficulty using the controls. Camera/phone keeps me in the game, and without internet and required equipment at home, my phone is also my computer. Like I said, it keeps me in the game.
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Whereas Iâm of the age where far-sightedness is setting in; bringing my reading glasses into the field, even though Iâm not going to be reading, is what lets me focus on the minutia.
As to the original question, how to find new things, one of the best lines in nature writing (in my opinion) was penned by Edwin Way Teale: âI spent the summer traveling. I got halfway across my front yard.â That line opened his book Grassroot Jungles, which was about insects.
This was a lot easier for me when I was a kid. Nobody bats an eye when a kid goes belly-down on the grass, looking intently at something only kids can see. But the reason only kids can see it is that grownups donât look. How did I find four- and five-leaf clovers in my front yard? The luck oâ the Irish? No. By looking very carefully for a long time at each clover patch.
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You reminded me of a talk by @ceiseman I attended. Paraphrasing, he said that he went out to get the mail one day (this is in Massachusetts), came back a hour or three later having found various leafminers, and a few years later, figured out he had found two species new to science, three major range extensions, and a new host for a well-known genus. (The details are probably wrong, because my memory is often lousy.)
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I read a story of how an entomologist that studied butterflies of one region, spent decades travelling around it, one day was walking in a city, caught a butterfly, described a new species.
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