This question comes with a prerequisite: you don’t have the time or financial resources to travel elsewhere to document new species.
As we all know, in a way, iNaturalist is a community of nature recorders and collectors. The thrill of adding new species is the very essence of the platform and one of the main driving forces that keeps users posting. I wonder if any fellow photographers who document across various taxa have experienced this: when you stay in the same area for a long time, limited by your personal range and equipment, the rate of adding new species inevitably slows down, especially for highly visible taxa. When you’re constantly encountering the same common species, do you experience aesthetic fatigue（getting tired of seeing the same common species）? If so, how do you deal with the struggle of adding new species?
I am having this problem, and it’s definitely been exacerbated by the heat storm we are having in Europe at the moment. For the last few weeks I have been walking to the same places most days, and I have reached the point where I am considering giving some of the butterflies I know their own names. I do find a lifer or two per week, occasionally I will see something new, like a fly, mildew or leaf mine, but at this time of year the insect and plant diversity seems to slow down considerably compared to the constantly shifting flora, fauna and funga of the spring. Most creatures are in hiding from the heat (including me), and there has been no rain for weeks so finding fungi is a distant memory. Even some of the trees are wilting!
Today however, I am determined to change things. I will explore some fields near me marked for development which I have been avoiding, at the moment they are wastelands of dry grass with a choked stream running through them polluted by the building site. However, they are a relatively unexplored territory which will soon be covered with bricks, ornamental hornbeam and infested with new people so we must take the opportunities life presents us. I suppose wherever we are there are always small places that are undiscovered. I will put on my hat, camouflage vest and bring a full flask of water to do some hedge-inspecting and grass shaking, and surely there will be something new! It is only a couple of months until the season changes, I’ll start college and there will be a new, refreshed cornucopia of species to see in my familiar refuges. Hopefully I will inherit my dad’s bike soon as well so I can go further afield.
This is a bit up to personal preferences, but for me the “newness” can often also come from finding something new within the known. To give a few examples around ants (since those are my favourite taxon, buit this can apply to lots of other taxa): It could be finding different sexes/castes for species where that is identifieable. (male ant, queen/gyne ant) Or finding a rarer morph or life stage of a common organism. (major/minor in ants, pupa/nymph stages, …) Behavioural obs are also interesting! For ants it can be trying to get an obs where they interact with aphids, or obs of mating.
I think sometimes one has to go beyond the process of simply noting down species and dedicate oneself to actually STUDYING those species. There are so many plants and animals that are under-studied in terms of their lifestyles, habits and behaviors and whatever. I’m sure there are things in your area that deserve such study.
This is an intriguing question for all of us because it can indicate more about ourselves than it does about the Nature around us. As others have suggested, if it is becoming too routine or boring to document common species or trying to pad a species list, look to other aspects of the ecology around you to stimulate your interest:
– Look to other groups of organisms: The small, the inconspicuous, the hidden, the cryptic.
– Even for the common species, what is their seasonality? For animals, what are their daily patterns? What are they doing? What are they eating? iNat observations can be used to document a lot of different questions other than just, “What is it?”
– Plants offer lots of opportunity to document their seasonality: Their growth, flowering, seeding, senescence. All of that is ecologically relevant and all of it can be documented by iNat observations! As climate change progresses, these aspects of seasonality and distribution become increasingly important, even for common species.
I ran out of plants and started photographing birds and insects. Then I ran out of birds (at least that I could get without a telephoto lens and many more hours of free time.) I haven’t run out of insects yet. Darned hard to ID them sometimes. But then I only aim for one new species a month.
Take up mothing. Seriously. The great thing about moths is you can never run out of new species to find. And you don’t even need to leave your home, just run a light for them. I am at well over 700 species of moths, but with something like 3,000 species in my state, I still have a ton to find. And I still get lifers fairly regularly in my tiny suburban yard, even though I have been running moth lights for about 13 years or so.
I was about to suggest this as well. I turn on some inexpensive UV lights (mostly CFL/LED) once every week or two, and all I have to do is walk out my front door. Most species are ones I’ve seen before, but there are always at least two or three lifers every time I do this.
Find intriguing questions that interest you that iNat observations may help answer. How variable are taxa and is that variation just because they are variable or is it because there may be multiple taxa lumped together that possibly need to be split? Do the keys to identify these work well? If not, can you figure out ways to improve the keys? Engage others in these questions too if you can. Calochortus example here. Ribes example here.
Nature is like a river - it never flows the same from one day to the next and you never see the same water at all the time. I’ve been stuck in urban areas for months on end before and got serious weed fatigue, but you can surprised, like discovering orchids, lachenalia or moraea where you least expect it, just because I’m out walking the same route on a different day at a different time of the the day or during another season. In saying that, even the common mundane weedy areas gives up treasures like new insects, fasciation, fungi etc. In the same vein, I’ve spent some months in a rural area where there is also not so much happening in the way of diversity, but still there was a lot happening, I just had to work a little harder at it (and I did not even have the equipment to capture birds at the time). It also just so happens that because of urban spread, some areas you get to, might forever disappear or your access to it might be forever blocked, so I tend to get as much as possible from it all the time (to prove this point - the place I saw my first disa ever, is soon going to built up with a spanking new high security estate, walled in for the sole use of those who can afford it and will be forever lost to the casual observer. And be sure, the habitat will change because the flora must absolutely be managed by the humans and not nature).
The ability to get bored is just an attitude. For me, the exquisite beauty of all this life and its ability to really live no matter the circumstances, keeps me gasping and grasping for more every single time I’m out there.
Just yesterday I looked up all the plant observations in my county under “explore” and I sorted them by species.
I scrolled through them until I found some species I was interested in (some that I’ve never seen, some that I just didn’t know were here), and then today I went out and found a couple of them, including this extremely cool milkweed (Asclepias hirtella):
I have been on a milkweed kick lately, which include making more observations of the regular, “boring” milkweeds, which are not boring at all, really.
Next month perhaps I will try to actually learn to identify asters, although that does not sound very plausible. The point is that there is always something new that I don’t know about. Or maybe something new that I don’t know about some old friend.
If you are truly out of ideas, I recommend helping to identify observations from your area. You might see something that inspires you. Remembering that familiar-to-you species are new and exciting to someone else might also help rekindle your interest!
"Travel’ is a relative term. You do not have to go hundreds of km to see new things. Take the time to identify different ecosystems in your area. Wetlands, rocky outcrops, limestone glades, etc. You might be surprised at how many microhabitats are present within easy traveling distance from your home. Even a modest change in elevation can result in a different species assemblage than what you normally see.
I am in a lucky position that so far I have not been long enough at one place to ever get bored by the nature surrounding it.. but I have to admit that Bogotá really got me close (just the city, once you left the city just barely the situation changed fast). What kept me going was some “filling-the-map-with-dots”-game. Yeah, I can be easily entertained like this.
But I like to challenge myself with the stupidest things sometimes. At the moment I try to observe Pyrrhocoris apterus at every month of the year.. only two months missing and I just need to remember observing them in August an November.. would be my first species with year-round documentation, and I love that it’s an animal, not a plant (which might be to easy).
When the big and flashy organism start to get a bit too repetitive to me, I love to dive into the details and observe the very small stuff… recently I started to observe dipterans again with more passion.. it usually fades at some point, as they rarely get IDed.
It also can be a lot of fun to try to get as many species as possible for a single spot.. a meadow, a patch of forest, a garden. One might start to see organisms they would normally overlook.
Or try to get as many interactions with e.g. a certain kind of plant..what insects or galls are associated with it? Or try to get different life stages of an organism.
One year I was totally obsessing over getting a photo of a European beewolf flying in with prey (spoiler: I got it https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/38401399 ) and was rewarded with something even better! I observed a beautyful species of cuckoo wasp I did not even know existed trying to infiltrate a burrow of said beewolves only to get ckicked out by the furious beewolf mom.. I still cherish that scene, it was like watching a documentary.
Ironically, my observations make up the vast majority of records in my local community. Due to the Great Firewall, there are very few iNat users in our area, which is especially noticeable in the suburban and rural towns. Most of the time, I have no previous records to refer to, so I have to blaze my own trails and become a reference point for others visiting the area.
The point is that there is always something new that I don’t know about. Or maybe something new that I don’t know about some old friend.
