Naturally, my most embarrassing IDs are in lichens. And usually happens when I’am IDing a lot and becomming tired and loose concentration in the end. Probably the worst one is when I IDed Rhizoplaca as Xanthoria parietina.
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I don’t know if this counts but I added a flower on a blue bird. They where both “We think it might be” and I tapped the wrong one. I remember tinking “Who thinks this is a flower”. Then someone commented a few days later about my mistake. But they where pretty kind and told me super kindly me mistake. This was a few weeks ago. Thanks for reading!
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I once id - ed a banded krait, which was inland, as a sea krait somehow XD
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Since I have never made an error in identification, I laugh heartily at all the mistakes others have made. …and if you believe that, I will sell you my new “Easy Guide to Flawlessly Identifying all Euphorbia’s in the World” which I wrote and published last night.
On a related topic, during a Big Day of birding many years ago, I casually called out “Osprey!” that I had spotted nearby to add to our day’s list, only to be quizzed by my confused colleagues: “Where is the Osprey in relation to that Great Blue Heron sitting on the post over there?” Uh, well, that was my supposed “Osprey”. I don’t think they believed anything else I identified the rest of that day. Sigh…
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I feel like mine would be this Southern Black Racer that I misclicked and identified as a Southern Black Widow. Eesh.
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once, i posted an observation (now deleted) from one of my old vacation photos that i thought was a photo of a rare bird in the area, and i identified it as such. turns out, it was a statue of the bird, and it wasn’t even that realistic if you were paying attention. recently, i came across some decoys of another interesting species, but this time i realized they were not actually birds before posting/identifying.
that said, i tend not to be embarrassed by wrong identifications. because it happens to the best of us.
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Back when I was a noob, I remember giving an ID of Delias pasithoe when it was in fact a Dysphania militaris…very obviously different species!
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I did a lot of mistakes when I started birding aged 13, I thought I had Golden Eagles and Montagu’s Harriers on our property, turned out they were buzzards and Marsh Harriers, also at first learned half of birds’ names with different accents on them and sounded silly trying to say them.
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/39752182
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/41487735
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As have I. My worst ones are when I somehow mixed up names (I think I may have some mild dyslexia - especially with numbers) and confidently proclaim them as correct. My thanks to Chris Schmidt for correcting me most of the time!
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I tend to use the 6 letter codes for plant ID, three from the genus, three from the species, and that messes me up all the time, mostly with CARHIR which I want to be Cardamine hirsuta but is actually Carex hirsuta.
Most recently I chose the insect Smilax sp. when I meant the plant.
And I constantly switch poison ivy (Toxicodendron) and dandelion (Taraxacum) which I think looks particularly like I have no idea what I’m talking about.
But the most embarrassing ones are always in discussions. It seems like any time I confidently argue that X is Y because… without a qualifier (e.g. “I think”) I’m invariably wrong.
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I don´t know about worst or embarassing… nothing embarassing about making mistakes if you are able to learn from them eventually :-)
But I think my most enlightening one was this one https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/38681756 which I initially identified as an beetle and even lectured the person that brought the whole thing on the right track of it being a butterfly about how it for sure is not a lepidoptera ^^
If I ever run in such an amazing critter again, I will know now what it is :-)
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Clicking on the wrong item in the list just happens - e.g. Thunbergia: I selected the bug instead of the flower… More “embarrassing” are actually rather common plants or critters which I think I ought to know, but … mis-identified them.
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Hey @allneonlike welcome to the forum!
I’ve made the usual errors when clicking on lists of suggestions but the low point was probably identifying dried sap as a very cool lichen species. One more lesson in why humility is a virtue.
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It’s great seeing everyone’s responses! I got a good laugh out of many of them and have been in a similar situation to nearly all of them.
After thinking about it, this one has got to be the iNaturalist ID I’m most embarrassed about: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/19519239
I IDed this E. parishii as E. ocellata based on my interpretation of FNA (particularly the material of one of the authors) when I should have remembered the discussions and warnings of Wheeler from the 40s. Wheeler’s work was what I looked up to the most as I started learning the species which makes it particularly annoying.
Nothing quite like misremembering one of your favorite sources and taking a lot of top-notch botanists with you when you should have known better. :-)
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Throughout my youth in New England, I commonly saw what I thought was ginseng, and was confused by reports that ginseng was rare due to poaching. Years later, when I looked more carefully at the field guide, I realized to my embarrassment that what I had been calling ginseng all those years was really sarsaparilla.
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Ah, just remembered one of my more foolish mistakes. I saw a towhee and thought “Ooh, a red-eyed vireo!” for the sole reason that I’d never realized that towhees also had red eyes. Way before iNat days of course, but here’s the picture:
Clearly not a vireo!
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Well, this is pretty embarrassing… it was my very FIRST observation (and on my new iPhone, too). I looked up what this oddly yellow spotted lady beetle could be by searching google images. I was quietly pleased when I found a match!!!
Then, perfect strangers butted in and said it was something else (I did not even realize IDing someone else’s OB was a thing). I googled further. I pursued my case … IDers were polite, but insistent it was not so. I wrote to help@ asking why all these people were saying my OB was something it looked nothing like. A kindly person (likely @tiwane) quickly wrote back and gently explained about how iNat worked and and a bit about the iOS interface.
Whew! It was quite an epic…
https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/17783630
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Lovely story about learning! …btw. officially you still stick with your original ID ;-)
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Yes, it was some months or a year later before I ever even heard of mention “Withdrawing” an id… which you still cannot even do on the iOS app, BTW. (So, don’t get upset about people not Withdrawing an ID; it isn’t even a thing on iNat iOS).
I will go update that now. :)
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