…you’re sitting at a campground and everyone else is shooing away “flies,” but you’re sitting perfectly still, enthusiastically taking pictures of everything that lands on you.
…your family used to love it when you said, “Let’s go on a hike!” That is, until they realized you start taking pictures about 10 yards from the car, and it’s a slow crawl from there.
…you’ve been seen enough times at the local park, contorting into unnatural positions and pointing the camera at the ground, at tree trunks, into the water…that a stranger walks by and says, “Have fun with the bugs!”
…you see something for the first time in real life that you’ve only ever identified from photos and drawings, and it’s like discovering a brand new species!
“Room was nice, very good lighting, but it really could have used more bugs. The place I stayed last week I got three different species including a lifer. Four stars this time around. Maybe better luck next time.”
… any travel to anywhere new is preceded by an hour on the iNat map checking out what other people have seen (what can I find) or getting excited to be the first to post observations in a place
… your mobile phone memory is always full. Your family want a quick snap for the album, and you have to spend 10 minutes making some memory space (which is often accompanies by that terrible feeling that you might have just deleted a beetle photo that you hadn’t uploaded yet)
… you feel slightly embarrassed when you’re scanning through your phone’s photos to show a friend your pet, your holiday, when abruptly it becomes multiple photos of grass (which if you squint hard enough actually has a butterfly in the middle of it, gradually getting bigger and bigger as you creep closer photo-by-photo!)
… you get upset when you go out for a day and someone has weeded the garden (“I was waiting for those weeds to flower!”)
… you are always at the back on any walk (sometimes by a long distance)
…you check in on the forum and get very excited to see some of your favorite “famous” iNatters posting in your topic, and think, “Oh yea! @tigerbb is here, I’ve made so much spider encounter progress partially thanks to her encouragement, I should tell her!” Oops, just did ;)
…you are percolating several silly bumper sticker/ t-shirt/ greeting card/ etc. ideas to express your love for iNat and hope they come to fruition (including an idea inspired by all of your awesome responses here.)
… you go wandering around underbrush and grasses in your new white sneakers because, “Hey, they were going to get dirty at some point anyway”.
… you’ve almost perfected the art of kneeling on one shoe (right knee on left shoe) in order to take better insect photos while wearing a suit or other nice clothing.
… you hear one of your students tell another, “Don’t kill it, let Teacher take a picture first”.
… you follow all the power users in the country and also have a URL bookmarked for all the observations in the country that aren’t from those power users.
… your days ends with checking the tides for the next day
… your day starts when you sit on the deck, observe the weather and listen to the surf before you decide what you are going to do
… you have two cameras - one for underwater and one for land and you hardly take photos of people
… you have the ICN red list of plants for your region set up for each category in your own lists so you can keep a track of which ones you have seen / not seen AND you have a journal post that you update with how you are going at finding those nationally critical plants every now and again
… when going to do work on your property the main tools you take are camera equipment - any thing else you remember to take is a bonus
… you have a closed project just for what you have found on your own property and there are only 325 species, but you want to find at least 500
… when you travel by vehicle and are driving, the person in the passenger seat automatically knows to turn your camera on and give it to you as soon as you say “Oh look” and start to slow down
… you have your region set to show any obs from there and as soon as one appears, you immediately check out who they are and where they are in case you can meet up with them
… you help iNatters who come into your area as it is so remote and special and they will miss out on obs if they do not have the insider knowledge. It doesn’t matter what their interests are because you know your area so well you can always give suggestions to cover their specialties even if it is not your own
… you look up a species on Nat and find you are the only one who has put any obs up. Then you load the GBIF data and find that there may be one or 2 other records but all of the others are still yours.
… your region has a mass of grey dots - and at least 90% are yours
Really excited to hear that the idea is a useful one!
What I find most helpful is resting my right elbow on my right thigh and wrapping the inside of my left elbow around my left knee and pulling back slightly. That keeps my body compact and means I’m swaying less while taking photos.
… you try to put at least a basic ID on every observation in your region which doesn’t already have one
… you learn about a new organism and immediately remember an observation in your region which you were unable to ID to kingdom
… and spend more than an hour searching for it so you can ID it
… you start reviewing Research Grade observations
… you start recognizing observations you’ve reviewed before, but skipped, thinking “Maybe I’ll know enough to ID this later”
… while reviewing observations sorted in random order
… from one of the iconic groups
… on the same day you skipped them
… someone you know asks you to identify a photograph
… which someone else asked them to identify
… and the scientific name comes out of your mouth before the common name
… you’ve been the first person to identify a species on iNaturalist.
… from a genus you didn’t know existed two years ago
… on a continent you’ve never visited
… more than once
-When somebody asks you to take a photo of them with your camera and you feel like you’re wasting the memory on humans when you could be photographing animals
-When you lock eyes with your neighbor while standing over a ditch in an odd position
-When you get excited and tell all your friends when you get a new species
-When you’re about to take a photo of a bird but then somebody lets their dog loose and scares it off
“Mom, we need to go here.” “Why? There’s nothing there but woods.” “Exactly.”
