We are not the strange ones, people who can’t understand us are the strange ones.
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How about T-shirts that say:
— I’m not suspicious, I’m just a bird nerd —
I’d wear it LOL! Reminds me of this shirt comment on a previous forum topic.
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How about when you stop biking to examine scat — hmmm, I’m thinking that has too much hair for domestic dog.
Meanwhile, people are watching you look at poop.
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I finally got my rabbit observation from the local school grounds and they’re on the iNat map for my county now. My kids had gone to bed early because they were feeling poorly and it was still very light that evening. I could see the rabbits in the field so I took the dog with me for extra ‘not a pervert’ credibility and got my photos. The only person who saw me looked like the kind of person who actually would hang out around a school taking photos…
I did recently get accosted by security guards for acting suspiciously though. I’d had a 3 hour drive and it was nearly midnight but I’d seen some interesting creatures that I just had to record. The guards were very friendly but didn’t seem as excited by sea slaters as I was. “You can bother the bugs but just don’t nick nuffin”
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Or when I’m in a parking lot next to the forest walking strangely and suspiciously at night, and a giant police car comes straight forward to you, then when it’s too close, it opens the windows, and a police officer asks you: ‘‘What are you looking for? What are you doing?’’.
Me: I’m just watching fireflies.
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My parents don’t really understand my drive to observe for iNat, but they’ve caught on. They were both outside a few weeks ago, and my dad came in saying “Your mom found some kind of weird plant, you should take some pictures of it.” The next day, my mom found some sort of pupa while gardening and yelled “Hey Mara, you’re gonna want to take a picture of this!”
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: ) As would I, though it’d also be cool to have custom iNat shirts that have our user tags on them
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T-shirt:
— I’m not suspicious, I’m an iNaturalist —
— carabid_47 —
Lol
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I think this falls under the …
you know you’re into iNat when you want your username on a T-shirt
category.
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That ‘not a pervert’ thing is a concern of mine, as there are playgrounds where I routinely look for birds.
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SAME!!! (just for me it usually isn’t birds, normally beetles, ants, flies, etc.)
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You know you’re seriously into iNat when…
…your main hobby other than iNatting is running but you have to intentionally not wear glasses/contacts while you run because if you could clearly see the plants/bugs you’re running by you would stop to take pictures and not actually do any running
…you recently moved to a new part of the country and one of the benefits has been being able to observe all the species native to your new area that aren’t found in your old area
…you’re torn between “there’s no point in observing cultivated plants” and “observing cultivated plants lets you get observations of plants not native to your area”
… you would rather have your friends send you pictures of bugs/plants/mushrooms they see than funny memes
… you reallize after you go on a hike that you barely looked at the views from the trail because the ground has more potential observations than the open sky
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As far as cultivated plants go, I think there is a case to observe them if they are in gardens and well established. They might be host to wild organisms (insects, pathogens etc) or they might end spreading and becoming naturalised, or not, which is also interesting. If they are naturally uncommon, it helps build up the AI database too.
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But it also adds species to your count when you only observed non-wild specimens, if that matters to you.
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I once brought binoculars to active playground. With kids everywhere, I felt pretty awkward sitting on a not-to-distant bench.
I was just looking for Blue Jays, people!!!
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I was watching a video with a relative and a clip of a bird protecting its nest came up. Sarcastically, the relative asked me what bird it was. I instantly replied “White-breasted Nuthatch”. They then burst out laughing.
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I was just going to mention that! Not only do I just enjoy taking pictures of things, but this is a big reason for my own observations of cultivated plants. I am a simple woman, I see numbers go up and my brain makes the happy chemicals!
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Sure! For me it’s the reverse, I feel like cheating and actually delete some casual observations every other week to not have too many.
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You know you’re seriously into iNat when…
…it crosses your mind that if you were to get monkeypox (or some other exotic disease), you would try to upload the encounter.
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…you really wanna go to the mall not to visit the shops but because you saw an opossum there one night and if you could photograph it this would be the first documented evidence of an opossum living around that mall.
…you are the boyfriend in the distracted boyfriend meme, but the girl you are staring at is actually a roadside plant.
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