I originally got into plants by taking a summer job at a garden center in high school. I originally wanted to be an aerospace engineer, but found that I enjoyed being outdoors a lot more than indoors! With that creeping interest in plants building, x Heucherella ‘Tapestry’ is the one that pushed me over the edge and solidified my desire to study plant breeding - I wanted to do whatever it took to make that plant.
As for iNat, I started using it because of an assignment in an entomology class I took during undergrad. But, being a horticulture/plant biology student, I did not get much use out of it then as I wasn’t too terribly interested in bugs and was still of the opinion then that native flora was “yucky” and not useful in the garden space; you can tell that first getting into plants via a job at a garden center had its impacts ;)
The first plant that got me really jazzed was Tipularia discolor which, if I remember correctly, I first stumbled upon while walking the woods around my parents house in winter. I looked it up on iNat and lo-and-behold: it was an orchid! I had heard about it before, vaguely, but this was my first time really paying attention to it. The thought of a terrestrial orchid so near-by and so common was so exciting! I eagerly waited the few months necessary for it to be in-bloom and went right back to the same spot I originally saw it and caught it in flower :D I was immediately hooked and started posting everything I came across on iNat, and giving everything I came across a lot more respect than I did originally.
Though it wasn’t until a professor told me spring ephemeral season was coming up in the spring of 2024 that I really, really got into iNat - I posted ~85% of all my observations in the past year alone. No sign of stopping any time soon :)
My spark organism that specifically got me into “iNatting” was, without a doubt, the Groundhog.
For much of my life so far, I have grown up with Groundhogs living under our shed, raising their young, sleeping in our patio chairs on our deck (literally!), and destroying the flower garden. To this day, it is a pleasure watching them go about their lives and studying their fascinating behaviours.
One of my favourite observations of one is in my profile photo!
That’s still my favorite wildflower book after all these years. Well organized, the drawings really look like the plants, and it’s quite complete for a non-technical work. I have 3 copies, in increasing states of disrepair from being dragged around in the woods. When I was in high school back in the late 60s I realized I was going to have to learn the latin names if I wanted to go further with plants, and I sat down with that book and memorized the scientific names of all the flowers I’d seen. Most pleasant piece of rote memorization I’ve ever done.
Unfortunately, most of the names have changed since then. I wish they’d re-issue that book with the nomenclature updated.
I kinda don’t have a spark animal, I just love them all. My ‘spark bird’ is definitely the eurasian spoonbill (Which is fun, because it perfectly lines up with my reading of the third part of the twitch book series). But probably my overall spark animal is the common albatross butterfly, who’s migration I witnessed a week ago :D
My ‘spark’ was a hike, too. I was always interested in natural history; we had a bird feeder and I collected fossils and what not, but where I lived was outer suburbs in Ohio, mostly weedy second growth forest and overgrazed pastures. I had one older wildflower book that had the ‘classic’ wildflowers in it, but I had never seen them. I went exploring one afternoon when I was about 12- walked through the farm behind our woods and went up a creek on the other side and came out in a piece of beech maple forest in full spring ephemeral bloom. It was glorious. Dutchman’s Breeches, Squirrel Corn, Violet Wood Sorrel, Bellflower, Trout Lily, Rue Anemone, Bloodroot: all the flowers from the book that I’d never known were there. That was 60 years ago and I still remember how excited I was. That was it - I was hooked on plants then and I still am. .
For me it was feral pigeons! I find them so pretty, especially the large range of patterns I see, so I started taking pictures of them whenever I was out and about. Corvids were a later one, because there was a particularly large carrion crow with very ruffled feathers that would always land on the roof outside my window, and that got me interested in corvids in general.
I actually can’t remember a time when I wasn’t fascinated by nature, but if I had to decide a trigger organism, I’d probably go for ants. When I was about 7 or 8 (I think), my father built me an ant’s nest between two panes of glass, covered with black plastic. I can remember to this day the anticipation of lifting off that plastic covering to discover what the ants had been up to since my last visit. Hours of innocent amusement! Then next came caterpillars which miraculously metamorphosed into butterflies and moths. Insects were my playmates and fairy tales, they still are today.
I honestly don’t even know, or if there even was a spark, I feel it’s more a spiral that has only got tighter and tighter over time. I can name more times that I had a potential spark, and it just passed me by -
In the 90s I had some close ups with puffins in the Hebrides, I even took some respectable photos for a preteen using a disposable crayola camera. I played with my mum’s SLR in the early 2000s and I took a picture of a blackbird, I have no idea even whether if it was a blackbird or a corvid. I had some lovely encounters with birds when I started birding in the late 2000s, and yet none of these ever truly sparked anything. I spent a lot of time in the bush building trails, riding bikes, walking dogs, and yet I didn’t really notice much. I’ve always loved wildlife, and yet I think I thought that wildlife was something that just existed in a documentary.
Then in 2019 I went to South Africa, and the number of insects that appeared in the yard, the exotic birds just in the street, animals that I’d previously seen stuffed in museums, they were here, alive, and intruding on my life. I started to go looking for things, I started with a conservation group doing invasive plant control, looking finely at the ground as I worked, looking closely at the bush trying to spot an unnoticed plant to be pulled. The closer I looked the more I found. Slowly slowly, day by day, I became absolutely captured by it. Til the point where I am at now where I would say I am possessed by it.
As the years pass I find more and more captivating groups to learn about, to look for, I hope that over time this only continues until I become completely and entirely immersed in life.
Oh man, I don’t even know if this is right, but I’m pretty sure it was some Hypholoma fasiculare mushrooms growing on some wood that I found out in a green area while I was waiting for my mom to pick me up. It didn’t directly get me into iNat, but what it did do was start paying more attention to mushrooms and nature in general. It was like a whole new little world opened up. I got this app called PictureMushroom that attempted to ID some of my finds.
Later on, I got into iNat after hearing about it from… …my spark channel! I was watching a lot of YT in late 2023 and after finding those stump mushrooms I found a YT channel called MushroomWonderland run by Aaron Hilliard. He lives relatively close, so it was cool to see an expert share knowledge about mushrooms that could potentially be popping up right in my local park without me knowing! And eventually he mentioned iNat so I thought I’d give it a try.
It really just took off from there. I’m now an active member of the local mycology club, which Aaron is the now former vice-president of. Great guy, fun to talk to, and informative content! And now mycology is one of my biggest hobbies!
I don’t really get why…but when I was about 12 or so our cats found a wandering garter snake in our laundry room in the winter. We lived right where the road went from paved to dirt in Clear Creek County Colorado, so we had a lot of wildlife but something about her hit me like a sledgehammer.
Mrs. Stinky was absolutely the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Come spring we’d (me and my mom) bought a Vision 2x2x14" or so cage for her. She lived until I was in college. Just set off a love of herps generally. Man, good times.
I suppose my “sparks” were not actual organisms but two things that got me fascinated about nature as a small kid in the late 1950’s - early 60’s. One was playing quartets with my parents and grandparents, when the latter visited every week. The card game all had nature pics on them: mammals, birds, frogs, reptiles, fish, butterflies etc. I wanted to know the names of all of them. At the age when most kids want to become policemen or firemen, I wanted to be a biologist. It was probably the first 4 syllable word I knew.
The second one was being glued to the small B&W television screen every time On Safari with Armand and Michaela Dennis was on. That was what I wanted to do when I was older. Little did I know then that I would end up in Zimbabwe 30-odd years later to run safaris in that country and Botswana for more than 10 years.
These days I suppose I am a botanist first but still a naturalist over all.
Being on INaturalist certainly keeps those passions and myself alive and kicking. Hopefully for many years to come
Happy record hunting to you all,
Bart
Idk, it was a bunch of random different birds that kept singing in Spring 2023 and I kept hearing them singing and I thought it was so cute and beautiful so it made me try to start looking for birds and then I started looking more for birds way more in Spring 2024 since I discovered Merlin bird id and I would record bird songs. And the reason I signed up to INaturalist was because of a random bird that sang a whistling about “He her he” or “Keep chirping/birding!” and me and my brother heard it for like 9 or 8 years but I tried to record it on Merlin Bird ID and see what it was but it couldn’t detect what it was, it could only detect random other birds singing in the background like an Eastern Bluebird. I’m not sure, but I think it is a Tufted Titmouse song variation that is common where we live. The most recent time I heard one which was only a few days ago, and I will submit it sometime, maybe today, I also heard a Tufted Titmouse alarm call after it was done singing that.
The white-crowned sparrow that showed up on my fence one late fall day that got me into active feeder-watching, and later actively birding
The Isopods, most likely Armadillidium vulgare that I used to keep as pets and carry around with me in their jar (full of dirt, sticks, and leaves) and show them off.
The Polistes dominula that I rescued from drowning in a pond - my first non-aggressive encounter with a wasp and I’ve loved them ever since. (honeybees still make me nervous)
The Blue Jays that are wonderful and noisy and Blue
The Turkey Vulture that landed in a tree in my backyard one. It was so big and cool.