Most of my friends pull out their phones even in the middle of the woods. I tend to roll my eyes and tolerate this. Merlin and PlantNet are certainly useful. But I grew up on field guides and conversations with more experienced naturalists. Instant AI-enabled possible-answers feel more like junk food info to me.
That said, my favorite "field guide" recently has been Wikipedia.
I don't usually look stuff up while in the field. I do what I've always done: make notes, maybe consult a book if I have it, then come home and do some searching. I Wikipedia from my couch, not from the field. I like Wikipedia for looking up various species, though, since it tends to be pretty thorough.
For example, my backyard groundhog is back. He (she?) abandoned the burrow last summer when the fence was put in. Too much construction in the neighborhood, I guess. But they're back now, and now both the entrance and peephole appear to be on my property.
I looked them up because I wasn't sure how much or when to fear for the chickens:
Answer: Groundhogs are diurnal, but she's probably not even home during the day. Adult groundhogs can eat up to a pound of vegetation a day. Nothing is eating a pound of vegetation in my yard a day. I'd know. Probably she gets up early, slips out through the little belly slide she dug under the new fence, and trundles off into the neighbor's six-acre woods to eat all day.
Wikipedia says groundhogs are less interested in eating other animals than a lot of their cousins are. That said, I know people whose chickens have been killed off by groundhogs. They don't always eat the chickens, but groundhogs are aggressive little shits, and I'm not surprised they'd kill a chicken if it was standing between them and food. Fortunately, it's unlikely the groundhog and chickens will ever cross paths.
Groundhogs don't tend to attack people unless they're cornered, which I already knew. They'll always run if they can. I'm not foolish enough to chase one unless I'm armed.
I'm torn. I don't mind the tubby furballs. My parents, however, have a "kill or relocate on sight" policy toward groundhogs, and they've been farming a lot longer than I have. I'll have to ask dad.
Yesterday, I got out of my car at the gym, and there was a kildeer:
I love these birds. I think they're beautiful. Their babies look absurd. Sideways-sticking-out fluff, heads too big for their bodies, legs so long they don't look functional. They look like God built them off a kindergartener's bird drawing.
ornithology illustration is my passion
I love them so much.
My life's ambition is to pet a kildeer in the wild without getting beakstabbed, which I know will never happen in real life. We've always had a ton of them at work. They like to hang out on the football field and nest in the gravel under the bleachers. There's a lake right across the street, which attracts them too.
TIL their Latin name more or less translates to "noisy chatterbox." I would have given that name to the red squirrel or maybe the grackle, but that's why God did not make me Charles Linnaeus, I guess.
And then there's the ivory-billed woodpecker:
A copy of Ranger Rick from the 1990s told me these are extinct in the United States. The last confirmed sighting was in Cuba in 1987. Yet every so often, someone will claim they heard one or turn up video or photo "evidence" of them. Are they still out there? My head says no, but my heart hopes. They're terrifying.
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