wildlander's Journal

Wildlandblogger's 20-- lifer

I sort my lifers by year.
Jared's notable discoveries
Scientifically-interesting or novel discoveries.
Jared's 20-- best
Observations most interesting to me from that year
Jared's major targets
Species I most wanted to see
Jared's plant collections
Specimen collected for the herbarium

In a couple of months I will be moving to northeastern Alabama- if anyone from that area would care to reach out I'd love to meet up safely.

In preparation for that I've decided to start up my old blog again, Lost in Nature (https://lostinnatureblog.wordpress.com/) and recently published a draft I'd had for two years.

Essentially, all Illinois Opuntia humifusa were recently reclassified as Opuntia cespitosa. Some of them in the sand areas of central and northwestern Illinois may be reclassified again in the near future per @atozbotanicals , but per Majure's reserarch: https://opuntiads.com/records/opuntia-humifusa-clade-chromo-counts.pdf and https://opuntiads.com/records/TYPIFICATIONS-NOMENCLATURAL-CHANGEs-eastern-opuntia-majure.pdf

All Illinois O. humifusa records, with possibly the exception of reintroduced populations, should be changed to O. cespitosa (or O. macrorhiza, but that's not been fully determined yet.) If you've seen me throw a weird ID on your Opuntia observation in Illinois, that would be why. As my knowledge of the complex doesn't go much past Illinois, I don't intend to review records from other states at this time.

Hi all! I just @ a ton of people in order to get some of my many Needs ID plants and other organisms confirmed. I've tried to only tag the same people for two or three observations at maximum, feel free to tag me back if there's something you need confirmed that I could probably look into.

I just got back from 4 days in Southern Illinois- I'm going to have a LOT of observations coming over the next few days since I took 1,800 photos over that time. My most interesting non-iNattable sighting was a barge stranded a mile inland near Miller City, Illinois, due to floodwaters from this spring.

Yesterday, on my iNaturalist Discord server, we got to interview the Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't guy from Youtube briefly. I started that server expecting maybe 20 people. 200+ members and counting, and now we're interviewing YouTubers. Second to getting out of bed in the morning, I think that's the best thing that we've achieved all year. Most of the credit for setting this up should go to @michaelpirrello.

I'm proud to announce that from now through August 31, I will be working for the Critical Trends Assessment Program of the Illinois Natural History Survey, monitoring plants across the state of Illinois. Since many of the monitoring sites are on private land, quite a few of my observations will be obscured. Just figured I'd throw that out there.

https://lostinnatureblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/30/lifer-damselfly-on-a-youtubers-shirt-and-other-snake-road-adventures/

Well I've gone and posted another entry to my blog. I also want to say that of late I've heard that a few people intend to try and win this Illinois Botany Big Year, and that at least one of them isn't me. I want to wish my competition good luck. Many of you know FAR more about field botany than I do, and I've enjoyed learning much about plants in this state from your observations.

I'm thrilled at the arrival of spring and I wish anyone who reads this has a good and productive spring.

https://lostinnatureblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/18/spring-break-wanderings/

New blogpost for Spring Break. I'm looking forwards to even more spring. Thanks again to everyone who IDs what I put out here. I'm learning so much from it.

Another blogpost entry, after the associated observation blew up in a couple of Facebook groups.

https://lostinnatureblog.wordpress.com/2019/03/10/yes-chicago-there-are-armadillos-in-illinois/