warrenlayberry's Journal

Fear of missing observations.

Back in September, I was told I needed to start walking after every meal as a way to help manage my blood sugar. This actually worked out alright as it provided a framework for my renewed interest in iNaturalist. I would upgrade my camera equipment and do a thorough exploration of Esquimalt. It interested me to get a sense of the flora and fauna of the neighborhood. I started mapping out the area in various loops of up to 5 km. I would study my observation map as it filled up and plan new routes accordingly.

It's now December 11, and I am closing in on a thousand observations and three hundred species, and I will likely manage to hit five hundred identifications by the end of the year.

I have covered many of the routes multiple times by now, and I am seeing a lot of the same things at this point. Still, there is always change. Always the possibility of being surprised by something new. September and October were incredibly dry; in November, the rains returned, and with the rains came mushrooms and new crops of licorice ferns. Bufflehead ducks have arrived.

One day at low tide I found a Tidepool sculpin in beneath a rock. Another morning I came across a dead Varied Thrush on a walkway overlooking the Matson Conservation Area.

But today I decided not to take my camera with me on any of my walks. First time in months I let a full day go by without taking a shot. I'm conscious of the possibility of getting weird and obsessive about it and want to avoid that.

But what if I see something on a walk, and I don't have my camera with me?

Answer: I will still have seen and appreciated it. I just won't have photographed it and uploaded it to the site. And that's okay.

https://inaturalist.ca/observations/141027444
https://inaturalist.ca/observations/141470073

I cannot read, write, or say the word mallard, without my brain calling up the Monty Python cocktail sketch wherein Michael Palin orders a Mallard Fizz from bartender Graham Chapman (tortured duck noises ensue), and later when Chapman asks if he'll have another, Palin demurs slightly and asks for a small one but then stops him. "You haven't got something a little less...eh...ducky, have you?"

https://inaturalist.ca/observations/144030816

"Every species counts or no species counts."
—Harry Bosch, naturalist

When I first moved to Victoria, twelve years ago, one of the first things that struck me was the number of ravens—or what I took to be ravens. The crows on southern Vancouver Island are large compared to the crows I was used to in Ottawa and Montréal, unless that is just my imagination. Plus, I suppose, I had Bill Reid in my head subliminally tipping the scales in that direction.

Over the years, I clued into the fact that I was mostly seeing crows (probably Northwestern Crows, Corvus brachyrhynchos ssp. caurinus) and simply assumed ravens were part of the corvid population I was seeing every day.

Now that I've been walking the neighbourhood and snapping observations on a daily basis, I have yet to take a definitive shot of a single raven. Not one. I am examining beaks, looking for spade-shaped tails in flight, considering the level of gloss to feathers when they are close, watching for prolonged periods of soaring when they are high above…

So far, no dice.

[EDITED Nov 20, 2022. Yesterday morning, as my wife and I were about to head back to Esquimalt after a nine-day stint of dogsitting up in North Saanich, I was holding open the property gate when a raven flew overhead. Unmistakable by both the tail and the sounds it was making. Beautiful. Of course, I didn't have a camera with me, but that was okay. After months of seeking it was pretty magical to finally set my eyes on one.]

Today I was walking along a residential street, DSLR around my neck, just casually looking around for potential observations on my way home. It was mid-morning, and I felt good about some of the things I'd captured. I was scanning the flowers of a garden I was passing for bees when I sensed something in my peripheral vision. I turned and saw a Cooper's hawk (at least I think it was a Cooper's hawk) sitting on a fence post about chest high and no more than thirty feet in front of me. Would have been the best shot of the day. Hell, it would have been the best shot of the day from twice the distance, but I wasn't at twice the distance. More's the pity. Had I been thinking, I would have inched my hand slowly to the camera and tried to snap a shot with the camera down in front of me. As it was I tried to lift the camera and the thing took flight.
It was a terrific siting, and who knows, I might get another shot at it; I was all of ten minutes from home. Still, I just wish I had captured it this morning.

Last night, as I navigated weird shadowy dream landscapes, I kept seeing small birds and mammals on the ground right ahead of me. I would reach for a camera, but by the time my clumsy dream fingers brought it up for a shot they'd be gone. This happened three or four times.

Today I was out on Esquimalt's Songhees Walkway with my camera, testing out a new GPS unit that clips into the hot shoe to record location data. As I stepped off the path and onto a small rocky outcrop, something a few metres out—a seal maybe or an otter—submerged, scattering brilliant afternoon sunlight. I decided to sit and wait, camera ready, but whatever it was never resurfaced, at least not where I could see.

When I gave up and stood, I noticed a strange pile of moon snail shells behind me on the shore. I walked over and snapped a shot. The dead nowhere near as elusive as the living.

https://inaturalist.ca/observations/137093734