Diario de sudenkorentoko

I have been confused and amused at how taxonomical names switch between English and Finnish seemingly randomly, and somewhat disturbed by observations 'going missing' only to pop up again on the next day or later.

Finally figured the latter part out - the app does not have a 'my observations' pointer to the tab, but if you press on the 'profile picture' area of the 'menu', that takes you there, and allows to make the unsynced observations synced and visible in other parts as well. I have 'lost' my way to the my observations tab while going around in bright daylight and fortunately the menu has an alternative way to add observations, but that one often leaves them unsynced and invisible (therefore also hard to update if some new information comes up a moment later).

I also ran into my first creature without a Finnish name here even though it has a Finnish name: Trombidiidae. Found it very impressive that this system actually has a localization-on-the-fly interface, so I donned my boldness cape and wizard hat and submitted a translation.

Oh, the feeling of community power!

Today's identification trip targeted a 'duck pond' and it had a surprise visitor! Now there has been 4-5 super satisfying bird encounters in the last few days. Have been trying to get more familiar with lichen and fungi, due to interesting proposals I've gotten when going after other plants.

PS. Got a first favourite star for a butterfly observation and promptly died of happiness. :)

Wanted to record the dazed dragonfly I fished out of water into some species database, so installed laji.fi's Mobiilivihko first. Then I realized iNaturalist works for LUOMUS as well, and I had that already installed, so tried to dig out my old account and failed, created a new account and uploaded it.

Got so excited about soon having my first 'research grade' observation (thanks to the identifiers!) that I went off on a field trip to document almost everything recognizeable I found on Pikkukoski beach on the Vantaa river, and some stuff on the nearby area as well. And a few things that I was wondering about through PlantNet before that.

Ironically, after spending over 10 minutes on Wikipedia trying to identify the dragonfly and thinking I had it figured out, I got a different opinion quite quickly and think that it's likely the right one even though the representative picture looks to me on a first glance completely different - the written description on Wikipedia matches that one better, though. (In case you can't tell, I don't usually identify dragonflies. I thought we had one.)

Now it's some 8 hours later from taking off to document plants and I think I got all the entries in. 87 observations is not bad for a first day, even though I think I won't be this effective finding new things (personal challenge) in the future. I also managed to find limitations to the app when it stopped updating my saved observations to the app and web UIs, which got me quite confused for a while (the new ones started showing up with some delay, and I didn't lose any data).

(I got blocked from posting this on the first day of account creatoin, so I can add that now it seems my phone app thinks I've made 80 observations and browser on desktop thinks I've made 95, and I think I've made at least 3 that are not showing up on either.)

Missions are great! They don't completely update based on what I have already found, it seems, but it is a lot of fun trying to find the 'recommendations'. I found one or two species I have not recognized before just trying to catch an Anthriscus sylvestris (koiranputki)... good thing I don't use it for salad, the other ones looked poisonous. ;)