… You have to pre-agree whether a family walk will be an iNat walk or not.
… You have a full-time job with a local church but are seriously considering doing an MSc in Entomology on the side.
… You brought an endoscope just from reading comments in this thread.
… You read this thread… To the end.
You make 50,000 identifications in less than a month
You keep going during bioblitzes and stay up till midnight taking pictures
You cannot sleep thinking about your observations
You log on everyday and you stay on for hours
You never leave your house without your phone for pictures
You take photos of every organism you see
You read every post on here
You identify EVERY SINGLE Parabuteo observations in ONE DAY
And also, all of those apply to me
…you ask for (and receive) the iNat tee shirt!
Special thanks to @carrieseltzer for corresponding w/ my husband and looking into the delays in shipping.
I received the adorable black tee just a few days after my birthday.
4 posts were split to a new topic: Speed identifying, quality controls, 4th, 5th, 6th, IDs: community perspective?
Wanting to keep this (as best as possible) a light fun discussion so please feel free to continue that conversation in its own dedicated topic, thanks!
Oof, I’m glad it wasn’t too terribly late :-) The delays can be so extensive now, especially for anything destined outside the US. Start ordering now for Christmas and 2021 ;-)
I got mine as a Christmas gift from my husband.
My parents got me one as a surprise, and gave it to me after I finished last semester (which was predictably chaotic after mid-March or so). I wear it for luck when I go out in anticipation of a big day of birding/bioblitzing.
… you get sunstroke staring at an anthill in a desert
… your camera becomes a part of your body
… you join the Birds Aren’t Real organization to appease insects and arachnids
… your neck becomes permanently horizontal
… your non-iNatter hiking buddies are five miles ahead of you
… you educate random people on trails about how jumping spiders are harmless, cute and fuzzy
you keep going back to the same plant to check its growth
You Take photos of every organism you see
You stop your family members from killing a spider just to get a photo of it
You look for the white patches on the maps and try to get a species there
You go to every other person’s observation and you get all of the species in one day
You take 750 photos in less than 12 hours
you take the humor of every organism around
I was eating dinner in Yosemite five years ago and took a picture of a squirrel eating a napkin, and then you frantically look for the photo to upload on Inaturalist
Hey, I do the same thing! I have one problem though…they always throw back at me the fact that every time I try to get a picture of one, it’ll jump/attack me, lol. I have nothing to argue against that. (Btw, any suggestions welcome, lol.) Doesn’t stop me from loving them though. :-)
I get rats eating my chicken food, and last time I saw them I ran inside to get some iNat pictures before chasing them off and moving the bowl.
Every walk you go on looks like this on your observation map
…you seriously consider how to get everyone across the globe to team up for some family or genus observing so that you can spell Hi, iNat! in the same color observation pins (different places can do different colors or I guess colours) across the whole map.
when the last thing you do before going to bed is check the front porch light
Definitely colours, I’m not sure what a color is… 
I believe “Colors” are endemic to the U.S., so you may never have encountered one. 
My personal goal is to see if I can make a line of observations from Spokane, Washington to Boise, Idaho under the smallest tiles (the last scroll before the red tiles change to the red points).
Secondly, I’m trying to cover my entire county full of these red tiles, though I suspect I’ll have to cheat to finish it because of private property so maybe I’ll get lucky and an obscured sighting will be placed just right. 
When you’ve made probably 90% of the observations in your neighborhood as well as maybe 70% in the several trails, neighborhood blocks, and parks surrounding it.
And when you are the top (and almost the only) observer at several city parks in your area.
…you have the most observations, species, and IDs of a large group (springtails).
…you find 100 iNat firsts
…you make over 1000 observations in a day (so far only once)
…you don’t let constant torrential rain stop you from making your daily observations