Friday, May 29, 2009

Oh, what did I get myself into?

I've been debating about the organization of this blog...

Typical blogs date-stamp to when you post the item. I'm more interested in recording when I observed the thing or behavior to document seasonal fluctuations, not so much of when I posted online. It's too bad that many incredibly informative sites don't also mention when you can see the thing in question.

I want to be able to search based on hiking dates, locations, monthly variations, and type of animal, plant or otherwise. My hope is that if I'm doing this next year or in following years, I can easily look back and compare notes and observations with previous years. Maybe at some point blogger.com will allow 2 or 3-tier search options, but for now labels and archives will do.

Unfortunately, I simply don't capture many of the cool things I see. I have a particular fondness for butterflies, but animals move too quickly and my camera does not focus well for close-up shots. I'm generally not interested in most trees, mustards, grasses, or other drier things found in most of CA.

My Nature ID blog naturally selects for those showy, bright things that hold still long enough for me to take a halfway decent pic.

ps 03/10/10 - I try my best to maintain integrity in truthfulness and accuracy on Nature ID as I write about my observations of the natural world around me, even with my backdated and edited posts, which, admittedly, are not ideal. I make no claim that Nature ID is in any way a scientific blog. I post whatever happens to interest me out of hundreds of pictures and thousands of moment-to-moment observations that I may have taken during any given hike. Nature ID has been a useful tool to motivate me to seek more information about my natural surroundings from the Central Coast of California... the sharing of that information is simply a side bonus (and sometimes a headache).