Stephen Q. Shafer

Joined: Dec 04, 2021 Last Active: Jun 03, 2023 iNaturalist Monthly Supporter since December 2021

I live on a small farm in southeastern NY. We found i-Nat when my wife and I, neophytes, joined NY Mycological Soc in Dec 2021. Then we started to use the platform for plants and fauna as well. I'm very impressed at performance of i-Nat Computer Vision on my (usually) sub-optimal images. Carried away, too, at the helpfulness of the community. I tag people shamelessly but try not to overwork any individual.
Eighteen months after having joined i Nat, I use it in three ways: Foremost is to get the most accurate IDs I can achieve to appreciate the wonder and diversity of what's living around us by (per Sherlock Holmes ) observing, not just seeing.

Second is to be able to name what grasses, forbs and legumes and what weeds are growing in our pastures so that we can improve forage quality for sheep. Grasses are so hard to ID!
The third, coming to seem the most important, is to create a convenience-sample inventory of the biota on these 61 acres as a picture album of a particular place. Flora and funga are much easier to capture with an i phone camera than fauna that rarely hold still to let me get close. Thus, my bird observations are few, way outnumbered by fungi that may be reticent but don't speed away.
All photos but one mushroom are from our farm or the river on whose bank it lies.

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