When you looked for this thread on the forum.
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I don’t know about iNat but I’ve been having bird dreams lately. I saw a snipe in one and some pukeko-like birds in another.
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You beat me to it 
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I literally had a dream last night that I found my first snake and first lizard of the year. I managed to catch both simultaneously and then shouted to my father to grab my phone from my pocket so I can take photos. It had to be my phone, of course, so I could submit observations.
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Or when you begin identifying mosquitoes rather than swatting them…
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I live in that last nightmare. I never have a camera on me when I see a cool critter.
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I love those little fellas! They live rent free in my house, along with a lot of daddy-longleg-lookalikes, a few moths, and a bunch of ants.
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- You can legitimately introduce yourself as one of the top iNat geeks in your area.
- Because you’ve checked the leaderboards.
- And you’re in or near the top ten in both observation count and species count.
- And you’re not disappointed in the amount of time you’ve spent on this. Even if you do comfort yourself by knowing it’s not a race to the top and the person who’s at the top is miles ahead of you anyway.
- But you are of the mindset that you should up your IDing game because you’re barely in the top 50 on that leaderboard.
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When you point out someones coloring page coloring of a northern cardinal is incorrect because they colored the crest black and it frustrates you.
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I hit #1 observer in Iowa within a year of joining, I’m in the top 500 for Illinois and Wisconsin as well. Not a lot of IDs in my area, but I am high up on the Araucaria ID leaderboard!
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…when POWO is temporarily unavailable and you think that the day can’t get any worse.
This could also indicate that you have a severe, incurable botany addiction…
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…when you’re going to a dentist appointment to have a broken wisdom tooth extracted, look around at the lovely, clear day, and wonder if you’ll have the energy to head out with the camera once the anasthetic wears off.
(For the record, I didn’t have the energy.)
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Mad props on getting high on an ID leaderboard. That’s where the real challenge is.
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When it has influenced what you’re going to study in university. Speaking from experience.
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Started my first part time job just for iNatting, made $10k in a year and a half (mostly after school and weekends), spent them all for iNatting.
No regrets at all! Well maybe one, I need to replace my PC soon because it’s way too slow to finish my enormous (currently 120k) backlog of unuploaded images…
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I purchased a Nikon Z9 (used) to get better photos for iNaturalist
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Did you too? Or are you talking about me.
It’s a great camera with very good colour reproduction and handy internal gps
lmao, we both purchased the same camera? I chose it because of the built in GPS and very fast autofocus (previous camera was a Fujifilm which I learned after buying it tends to have slower autofocus)
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That’s cool, I guess serious iNatters often end up using similar gear!
I bought it for mainly birds but soon I found that it’s really good for macro too especially when used with suitable flash and diffuser.