Hacker News Reader

Comment by mongol | Hacker News Reader

I have seen about 180. Nothing to brag about but it has taken me about 10 years. I have not been obsessive about it but has been a leisure activity many weekends. I have done it around the area I have been, but not travelled further than maybe 2, max 3 hours for the point of it. It is a nice hobby, sharpens your senses and it is fulfilling to observe nature. Compare for example with Pokemon Go, I find it infinitely more rewarding to "hunt" something real.

View on HN

It’s more healthy not to be so “obsessive” and just do it because it’s a fun way to get outdoors.

Though the obsessive ones get celebrated it seems like a kind of madness, I wonder if they even enjoy it.

I do like photographing birds. So I’ll often bring my camera.

Once and while you’ll see something different like a heron catching fish.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/9661826854/in/photost...

But a lot of times it’s just different ducks. https://www.flickr.com/photos/acomjean/50990143647/in/photos...

Cool! Flickr actually has a group "Field Guide: Birds of the World" and it tags photos of birds with their species. Combined with Flickr's API this is a gold mine to retrieve freely licensed photos of birds by species. The majority when I looked were tagged "All rights reserved", but most common species have at least a handful with Creative Commons license.

https://www.flickr.com/groups/birdguide/

And there's a season just for that last category:

https://www.birdandmoon.com/comic/four-seasons-of-bird-watch...

But on the other hand, our knowledge and classification of the natural world is built on the shoulders of the "obsessive"s.

Most areas of naturalism require digging deep and obsessing over minutiae to unearth new discoveries.

I'm not an exclusive bird observer. I make observations of 'moving' organisms from mammals to invertebrates, recording my observations on iNaturalist [1], which is a pretty good way for me to track what I've seen.

[1] https://www.inaturalist.org/observations?place_id=any&user_i...

I'm always surprised by the quality of insect pictures on inaturalist. What are you using? My focus has been on fungi and plants, but I try to scan what people are recording in my region just to keep up with what is around, where it is and what time of life it is. The turtles laying eggs around now are worth keeping an eye out for as an example.

I am currently using a Sony RX10M4 camera with a Nisi close-up lens attachment.

It is a 'point and shoot' model (no detachable lens), so the lens attachment helps to zoom in on small organisms. With some support, I can take handheld shots of insects about 5 mm in length.

At the moment, I still find mirrorless cameras by Canon, Sony, etc. a bit too expensive for my taste, so I compromised by getting the RX10M4, which is considered one of the best P&S cameras with a huge zoom range, which is good for shooting all kinds of wildlife, big and small.

> Compare for example with Pokemon Go, I find it infinitely more rewarding to "hunt" something real.

Ha, that’s exactly how I describe mushrooming. You might find it similarly satisfying, though if you plan on foraging for food I recommend taking a course on identification (most communities have a mycology club) and sticking to the basics.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com