Maybe this is working...even if it is not doing what I thought it would
Well, I have managed a single modest hike in the woods since I started using the site. I had higher hopes, but the press of work and family are keeping me from a serious look even at my immediate surrounds. But, having the app on my phone is definitely making me look harder at the world than I had been. Back in the Grinnell notes days, I would manage 30 species a day in downtown Manhattan and over 100 on a poor day in Florida. Recently I have been wondering through without an open mind. I have been missing good stuff.
This site has me looking harder at what is surely dross, crows, sparrows, swallows, and invasive plants. But, in looking a little harder at what I see every day I notice things I know I would have missed. For example, I know towhees. I know their call and their antics, I can tell a towhee in the brush from a mammal or herp by the timbre of its fidgeting in the litter. Sitting in my office I can think of two spots within 500 feet where I could show you a towhee with just a little luck. But...I am not sure when I last SAW a towhee by accident. Well, actually I am. Carrying Abel Tasman to the car, as he pointed and laughed at a passing dog, there, in the wrong spot, 10 feet from the bushes, on a manicured lawn, was a spotted towhee. But for this site, the iPhone weighing my pocket the way my field notebook used to, I would missed it. Just another LBJ in my peripheral vision.
My predatory instincts are getting sharper. And, best of all, there are real experts in things I barely know, who are willing to put names and background to stuff I used to see as scenery.
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