Learning the Latin and Greek roots helped me remember names so much easier. It stuck in my brain better when I knew how the name related to a feature of the plant or animal. There are several good books out there, just look for “Latin for biologists.”
…you would rather watch pollinators in your garden than go to brunch with your friends.
…you spend hours looking through old photos to see if there’s anything interesting to upload to iNat.
…you stop caring about whether your photos are pretty. As long as they’re diagnostic, good enough. More time for more observations!
but at the same time,
…you have literally hundreds of photos of the same bug
…you look for holes on the map to fill up with observations
… you let weeds grow up in your garden so you can figure out what they are, or you get really excited when there are weevils in your bag of rice because it’s a lifer species for you
…you start teaching iNat workshops…and working iNat into your job…
…Google Photos asks if you want to share your recent family photos with one of your top buds, help@inaturalist.org
I get Google’s funny little recommended photo montages, ‘A day in Salisbury, Vermont’ or whatever and it’s all a bunch of blurry pictures of white pines, bad pictures of bugs, photos of obscure sedges etc.
The “pull your car over when safe” reminds me of yesterday:
…you tell your spouse you’ll be scouting during family commutes for safe pullover locations in a tricky area- 3 months in advance of the appearance of the uncommon plant that could be there, just to make sure there’s enough lead time for comfort…
…You choose college classes specifically to improve your identification skills and to gain access to microscopes for micro-observations on iNat. (Microbiology? Heck yeah!)
…You were unaware of the Instagram and Facebook crash of 2019 because iNat is your most frequented social site.
…You find excuses to incorporate and cite iNaturalist in almost every paper you write.
You take a short, group trip to Panama City, and even in primarily urban areas, you end up with over 900 pictures for iNaturalist (with only about 50 non-iNat pictures). You even fall asleep while trying to capture as many indentifiable pictures as you could out the window of the bus!
I have a habit of obscuring everything, but if you saw the roads I traveled on my Panama trip, then it is probably similar. The road to the national park we visited is particularly covered in observations!
oh no, if on a roadside consider not obscuring! You don’t have to, that’s your choice but… that’s good data if you’re able to share location! If not it is very limited in use.
I uploaded these observations as batches that included many different locations. I set the whole batch to obscured, but if I have a chance I will publicize the roadside ones.
…it takes you several hours to hike one kilometer because you have to stop and photograph each plant and sift through the dirt looking for little crawlies.
A recent personal example:
4 iNatters walking 1.2 miles = 3.5 hours
Me going straight back to my car along the exact same route = 20 minutes
… you make your purchase decision for a new camera based mostly on the GPS incorporated into one particular model, so that you can make iNat observations more efficiently.
… you and a friend you’ve met through iNat have finished making observations at one spot and are about to head west when someone runs past you and warns a group heading east to watch out for a large snake on the trail—and as that group turns back you and your friend simultaneously start heading east to make the observation. (The snake was gone by the time @alisonnorthup and I reached that spot, dang it!)
When you’ve been tagged by a rattlesnake twice in one week because you’ve become OCD
Doing observations of cactus and small plants
And forgot rule number 1, when hiking in the desert to always pay attention to what’s on the ground in front of you… the later being in my backyard cleaning a desert tortoise enclosure but I was to busy not paying attention because of Orioles
Harassing a ring tailed cat that set up shop in my neighbors tree thats when you know you’ve become
A true INat’er