Today is the third anniversary of my using iNaturalist. It all began with my first-ever trail encounter with a Pacific Rattlesnake on August 13, 2012. The snake lay across the trail, enabling me to get passingly decent photographs. When I went to enter the snake in the old Herps of California page, though, its curator redirected me to iNaturalist. Thus was a happy addiction born. Today, to celebrate, I will take a long hike later on my newest regular trail (Stile Ranch/Santa Teresa Park). However, I already did a mini-celebration this morning by identifying a bunch of observations from friends and strangers, boosting my ID total over 4,000. The social media aspect of iNaturalist, and the way we learn from each other, has been a major plus for me (and a distinct difference from the still hierarchic and hidden processes of eBird, which I also still love).
The first observation...
http://www.inaturalist.org/observations/112458#comment-336180
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Happy iNat-iversary! Mine is coming up in October, but I had a long hiatus in which iNat was something I often thought about but felt like I didn't have time to do. Now I make time :-)
Did you see the iNat-iversary present nature gave me? A tarantula! Yes, our participation in iNat goes up and down, but I feel like I've taken my amateur interest in nature and given back in the form of permanent, verifiable observations. That's cool. Keep at it!
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