What originally got you into nature?

I heavily relate to this I used to have this HUGE book and it had dinosaurs, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, birds, fish, the whole nine yards, but I mean as a 4 year old this book was almost twice my height lol! I would also make Jurassic park zoos lol!

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you just reminded me of another! the Zoo Tycoon computer games, especially the 2nd one

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Uh, just me, I guess? Loved nature books when was young, really cool translated american book series about animals (still at my parent’s home, thin but not less exciting), after “reading” them I really thought we had skunks, and those light purple and dark bats sitting together, right like one I saw at the sunset (I thought it was it!)… From bird one I remember Barn Owl, it was so cool with sharp claws. I liked dinosaurs and the summer I saw Coots when I was 13 I switched to birds, I mean, to avian dinos.

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OMG YES!! Me and my cousin used to play Zoo Tycoon 2: Ultimate Edition on my laptop all the time!

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My mom got her degree in wildlife management, though she never used it (stay at home mom). She was always pointing out various flora and fauna and telling us interesting things. She regularly picked up snakes and bugs to show us. I was outdoors oriented, and curious about what was living around me. I usually used facebook group-think to figure out what I was seeing (particularly what I found in my yard after we bought our first house 5 years ago). I was not specifically focused on general ID and biodiversity until inaturalist computer vision revolutionized the way I interacted with nature.

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I grew up in the woods - my family lived in an old school bus a half-hour drive from the nearest town (which only had 4k people). Nature wasn’t really something to get ‘into’, it was all there was. We didn’t have a tv or even electricity, so running around the woods chasing squirrels and catching bugs was the main entertainment available.

We depended a lot on the land for food - our parents taught us all the edible plants and berries and fungi, and would send us out to collect some for dinner, or to catch fish up at the pond. Sometimes my brothers would hunt squirrels and rabbits for us.

So it was pretty much playing in nature, foraging in nature, or reading books (mostly about nature).

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Well, the question of getting “into nature” is a bit hazy and difficult for me, but probably reptiles. However, I can definitely tell you what got me into plants. I should probably preface by saying that my earliest interest was dinosaurs followed by planes and then herpetology. With herpetology in what was probably my early teens, I went outdoors and liked catching reptiles and giving names to individuals based on their head scale patterns (I fondly remember a little Sceloporus I named greenhead that was particularly fearless that ultimately led to his doom). However, I never really got into nature in general until I found plants.

I got interested in plants because my family moved from Dallas, TX to the Lamesa, TX area. My extended family had always considered the area barren and desert-like (not in the good sense of the word). I’ve heard many locals call this the armpit of the world. However, in the spring we had tons of wildflowers (especially Dimorphocarpa candicans). I’ve always like naming and cataloging, so I naturally had to identify every wildflower on the family pasture. From here, I joined up as the youngest Texas Master Naturalist for our chapter during my mid-teens. I also gained an appreciation of ethnobotany, entomology, and even a little ornithology at this time. By this time, I was hooked on nature.

My mentor at the time, Burr Williams, knew essentially all the plants out here. One group that I was curious about that he never attempted a species ID on was the Chamaesyce group of Euphorbia (E. sect. Anisophyllum). I kind of took this as a challenge and didn’t get to where I could satisfactorily ID all the local species until I was actively studying them at Sul Ross. At this point, I had learned enough that there were problems with the taxonomy that just kept me going. At some point, I must have fallen in love with the group as I can’t get enough of its intricacies.

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Grew many of our veggies; my Dad built an aviary; we fished; caught and bred birds; reared tadpoles; my parents bought me a Thomas Salter microscope…plastic battery powered but I remember getting flies out of the florescent light fixtures and examining their wings. For science fair I raised caddisflies and provided them with match sticks which they placed in their cases…and I ended up as a biologist.

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I’ve logged hundreds of hours in Zoo Tycoon 2. It was actually a great way to learn about all the animals, their environmental needs, and zoos!
There was another game I used to play as well, called Zoo Vet, a surprisingly realistic simulation game where you were (surprise) a vet taking care of exotic zoo animals. Hippo with tooth problems, geckos that needed surgery, annual checkups on penguins :)

(As an aside, any videogamers, I’m always happy to add more friends on Steam, send a PM!)

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I play a lot of video games lol, not as much on Steam (mainly shooters on Xbox) but I sent you a PM! :)

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When I was about 3, my mother got a set of large prints by Jacob Bates Abbott called “Birds at Home.” She pasted them on poster board, sewed the posters back to back on the sewing machine, and made a book for me. The only text was the bird’s name. I can’t think how many hours I studied those prints, learning that male and female birds are different, how the nests looked, what the birds ate. My grandmother then showed me we had the same birds at our feeder and in our yard. That was it for me. I still have the book, 70 years later.

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Love all of these stories!

My dad was a farrier turned commerical-logger turned draft-horse-logger/one-man-conservation-lobbyist. My mom worked at the county Soil and Water Conservation District. Plenty of summers in the woods. I remember munching on Miner’s Lettuce and Sheep’s Sorrel.

Later, hiking and backpacking trips into the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, the most beautiful mountains in the world on the northern edge of the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem.

But, what tipped me over the edge into getting serious about species identification after decades of feeling vaguely guilty over my ignorance: The Sand County Alamnac by Aldo Leopold. He argues that perception is the unlimited, non-consumptive natural resource. You must begin working to build your perception, and thereby your enjoyment, by learning the names. I knew I needed some technological help sorting and categorizing my observations, and found iNat.

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Gosh, what DIDN’T get me into nature? Here’s a few things that might have influenced it, off the top of my head.

To start, I was brought up along the Monterey Bay, in an incredibly biodiverse area. I’ve been lucky to be surrounded by nature since essentially day 1, and to have parents who encouraged my interest in it.

Reading was undoubtedly huge for me, too. I started reading from about age 2 or 3, and never put a book down since. I was also big into the Guardians of Ga’Hoole books, as well as the Redwall series and pretty much anything on (non-domestic) animals I could get my hands on.

Though I don’t play them much anymore, video games probably played a part in this, too. I was an avid Zoo Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon 2 player early on in life, and probably still would be if I had a computer to play them on. I even got the ports of the games for my Nintendo DS! Eventually, in middle school, I also finally hopped onto the Pokémon craze. As fun as the games are, the speculative biology aspects of the series, both implied and actual, have always interested me the most. How would these creatures evolve, for instance? Early on in my interest, I would often think “if Pokémon were real, I would research them!” Pokémon GO also helped, though I was helplessly fascinated by nature at the time it released.

Dinosaurs, though. Oh man. These were the crown jewel of my interest in nature, and tie back into a lot of the other factors listed above. Dinosaurs were some of the first topics to capture my interest back when I started reading, and continue to do so. In Zoo Tycoon, I would build zoos made up of only extinct species, and even download user-generated content to add accuracy and more species to the game. In the Pokémon series, the fossil-based and dinosaur-based Pokémon have always interested me, too. Throughout most of my grade school education, I was 100% set on becoming a paleontologist. Even now, I still haven’t ruled it out entirely. In 2015, though, was when everything changed. Ever since I found out about the bird-dinosaur connection (scientifically speaking, birds are the last living dinosaurs!), I’ve been completely fascinated by it. My parents allowed me to take summer classes at the local university in high school, and one of the ones I chose to take was “Natural History of Birds,” hoping to gain more insight into this topic. While it was brought up, we spent much more time on extant birds, even going out into the field and birding for field trips. From there, things just spiralled out of control. I got an eBird account, then iNaturalist, and the rest is history.

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I was really into insects because I was born four months premature so I was underweight and small and insects were also small and everywhere and so I would learn all about ants and watch them instead of making friends because I was autistic and social skills are hard. Also I liked that other kids were scared of them. I used to draw them too. I stopped being into bugs when I made some human friends, but then in middle school my human friends stopped being my friends so I fell back into the wormhole (literally) and I just never left even when I made new friends in high school because they were attracted to me because of my nature interests, not despite the,

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I love it that iNaturalist is autism-friendly.

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The long version of this story runs more than 300,000 words, my autobio “Windsong.” My parents had nine kids but often went camping. My youngest sister went camping at age 2 weeks, which is surprising to my Chinese friends whose mothers will often stay in bed for a month after giving birth. One summer we camped 13 weekends in a row, after two uncles and cousins had to be pulled from the riptide along California’s coast. In particular, a naturalist in Yosemite sparked my interest in, “That would be a fun job.” The clincher was on Oct. 16, 1966 in Highland Hammocks State Park, Florida when a naturalist showed us 32 species of birds in two hours. I was hooked and soon had a life list with more than 100 at age 14-15. Majored in Zoology, married a botanist, later Master’ed in Botany, worked for the US Forest Service for 17 years ending as Southern Region Regional Ecologist and Acting Regional Botanist, then got involved in learning Chinese and making observations while teaching English and art to children in China, spawned when my interest in Chinese resulted in my son marrying a woman from Shenyang in mid-life. That’s the condensed version, uncharacteristically short!

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When my mother and sister started volunteering on Otamahua/Quail Island and I went along one time and loved it and I’ve been going along ever since.

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I believe my dad, who loves outdoorsy stuff, got me interested in “nature” so to say. As there is a right to roam in Sweden, we often went out to pick berries and mushrooms in the autumn. Further, we have many a book with “survival skills” and “local animals” back home when i grew up (still have those somewhere there) which also got me interested in biology. As for my interest and choice of career in Marine Biology. It was not the BBC show “The Blue Planet” (though i suspect that show also had part in it) that got me interested. Instead i believe it was a point-and-click game we had on a old mac computer then, the game featured a scuba diver diving down and talking about the different animals and i simply loved the game to bits for some reason.
That’s about it i believe :p

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Pokemon surprisingly. I used to love the Pokedex and collecting data on every Pokemon I caught. So when I was thirteen, I started to wonder if I could do the same with plants and animals, and so I found iNaturalist, which when I was little, would call a real-life Pokedex. Later on I took some bird watching classes with a eco-youth program known as “Ironwood Tree Experience” and soon I found a fascination for photographing birds.

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A song by Rush (Subdivisions) that I was used to listen in the period I was studying botany. Actually that song has nothing to do with nature. Before having the chance to read the lyrics, I wondered if it dealt with taxonomic subdivisions. Loving that songs, I became fascinated by biodiversity.
Anyway, when I was a young child I was fascinated by insects and other small animals but unfortunately, when growing up, it happened that this interest temporarely became hidden.

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