Years ago I made this comedy video which was supposed to portray a mob of starlings attacking my birdfeeder and driving away native species, only to learn a few weeks later they were common grackles and I had demonized an entire flock of innocent birds as “invaders from countries beyond”
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I have a hunch that if this survey had been made before Pokemon, it would have found that they could identify more dinosaurs than extant British wildlife.
Especially when so many are under the impression that carpet beetles are skin parasites, like bed bugs.
Or when people kill crane flies, thinking they are killing enormous mosquitoes.
Or all the people with their “water moccasin” stories, who describe what is obviously the behavior of a common water snake. Many of these stories even come from outside the cottonmouth’s range. No wonder those old-fashioned “snakebite cures” worked – the snake wasn’t venomous to begin with!
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Every snake here is either a brown snake or a tiger snake, even though we have 11 species living in the area. The only flowers people know are the common orchids, and every. single. flying insect is a bee. trust me, its frustrating.
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Too right, I’ll also add that every brown snake is a ‘King Brown’, that every shire has the largest ‘King Browns’ in the entire country, and that they grow an additional foot in length for every beer chugged at the local pub.
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well I am that one kind of person you are all familiar who has just start discovering nature, there was a day when I saw a bird with brown head and green body, I wondered and told my dad that it must be hybrid of of parakeet with some other bird but later I find out that it was brown headed barbet, a bird fooled me :(
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Driving by a corn field, before the cobs were being formed, with some volunteer biologists. I was asking them about plants (which I am admittedly not good at), and asked them about what crops were being grown. I was being somewhat facetious, but… turns out none of them could identify young corn plants. Took me a bit by surprise…
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Chiming in with the previous observations about widespread lack of cicada awareness, I was surprised by how few iNat users (let alone the general public) were interested in Magicicada (periodical cicadas) in previous years…and then the Brood X emergence of 2021 happened, and a new generation of cicada enthusiasts emerged.
It is amazing how many people contact me or my husband in the months following a Magicicada emergence to ask us about “giant green mutant cicadas” or ask why there’s a “new brood” coming out when it’s just the perfectly ordinary Neotibicen that come out every summer. They’ve just never noticed them before, and somehow went through all their previous summers unaware of what was causing all the ruckus in the treetops. I’m only just learning to tell them apart from their calls, but I’ve been aware of annual cicadas since I watched one ecdysing on my grandpa’s front porch in Texas when I was six years old. I think I was just lucky to have been brought up in a family that encouraged biophilia!
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And here I am, never having been in Magicicada’s range, who only knows Neotibicen.
People don’t know one worm from another. Remember that lab we did in high school, cutting up the planarian and watching each piece grow into a new worm? And then most people believe for the rest of their lives that earthworms can do that.
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Earthworms certainly can regenerate though, not if you cut it longitudinally and harder than flat worms, but still pretty much the same thing.
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Also: a lot of people think that any plant with a fluffy seed ball is a dandelion.
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Including Ironweed.
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My friend and I hopped down to the village just to have a bit of a chat in the summer holidays one time. I was actually telling him about Inat and how much you can realise is around you by simply downloading the app & using it a little bit. I showed him this by simply picking a small area and picking out all the different kinds of grasses I could see. He then replied “Oh I thought these were all the same. I thought this was just a baby grass… this is a teenager grass…” and so on. I was laughing so hard!
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Penguins in my neighbouring suburb at Boulders Beach (and we missed a penguin for our first bioblitz ;~))
@kaipatiki_naturewatc
(and those three are living here … manitoka, pohutakawa, Norfolk Island pines …
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I knew about pohutukawa, and yes that is one of the few native plants recognised by NZers.
Manitoka I dont know, will look it up…or maybe you mean manuka?
And it had never occurred to me that Norfolk Island pines are native to NZ…I dont know how far away N. Island is but yes, I suppose it is part of the political entity called NZ. I do know a musician who used to have an annual gig there, getting helicoptered over to the island.
I loathe Norfolk Island pines. They have been historically commonly planted in local parks, usually isolated and harsh looking in Auckland habitats, and dont “mesh” with anything.
But now I will have to look them up. And even if it turns out they are indeed introduced to mainland NZ, I will probably learn of some ecological merit I have been ignorant of.
The other two NZ native plants that many people know, or at least used to know twenty years ago, are “cabbage tree” Cordyline australis, ti kouka; and “five finger”, lumping several species of Pseudopanax. But I think even these two are unnameable …with any name…by most current residents.
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My father called it manitoka, but iNat uses ngaio?
If I look across my ‘leafy’ suburb, you could imagine that Norfolk Island lay off Cape Town. Instead of between NZ and Australia.
And Coprosma repens? That is one of yours and very popular in gardens here.
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Ah, interesting, iNat does not have that name for ngaio. Many native plants have multiple Maori names, probably due to regional language development among the first, Maori, colonists on arrival 800 years ago in NZ.
I must follow up with the curator, as it may be part of language history being lost…
Taupata, Coprosma repens, is very popular in gardens and parks here too. It is naturally a coastal species, hardy to exposure.
If you look almost anywhere round here that is growing wild vegetation, whether abandoned habitations, vacant land or nature reserve, you could be forgiven for thinking you were in Australia or the Tropics. Its no wonder the local population dont know a native plant when they see one. They assume that the obviously wild plants surrounding them are native to NZ.
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but you won’t change it because of me? He left NZ in the Thirties.
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This doesn’t happen to me much, because my immediate family is reasonably familiar with most things I am. However, I recently went to visit relatives in Pennsylvania, and while I was there I saw an osprey. Very exciting for me! I went around showing the photos to people, and found that while they could tell it was a raptor, their species guesses were completely wrong. My 7-year-old cousin said “Oh, cool, a bald eagle,” and my great-aunt thought it was a Golden Eagle. Clearly not everyone knows what large soaring birds are!
(Observation here)
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I only recently learned about springtails myself, thanks to identifiers pointing out that they existed, and that I should stop calling them “insects”. It was confusing to me because I’d been learning all my life that the annoyingly-non-taxonomical designation “bugs” contained two types of animals: insects and spiders. Therefore, if it was a bug and was not a spider, it had to be an insect! …Apparently not.
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I was thinking there can be multiple common names for a species in iNat, but perhaps you are right, and ngaio certainly needs to remain as the one shown first. I wil leave it anyway
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