My 'mystery' folder

Being an incompetent pan-lister means that, on a more regular basis than I care to admit, I take photographs of living forms that I cannot identify in the field. These are mostly fungi, or beetles, or mosses, or flies, or lichens, or... you get the picture.

On my return home, I load these images onto the computer and place them in a desktop folder called 'Mystery'. And here they live until I get around to looking at them, by then armed with reference material. Once identified, (and if the photo is good enough), it will then be filed. But the mystery images in the 'mystery' folder are always being topped up - and it is never empty.

At the end of 2013 I decided to empty the 'mystery' folder. There were mosses and flies from 2010 that had taunted me for too long. I realise that even a cracking photo might not be enough for a positive identification anyhow. You cannot take a spore print from pixels. I surrendered. I deleted them. A great sense of calm came over me.

I currently have one image in this folder - a fungi that is most probably too far gone to identify anyway. But as spring stirs, so will thousands of species, including many that will have their picture taken, destined to fill, once more, the 'mystery' folder...

Comments

Ali said…
I know that feeling! Are you sure you don't have those moss photos...
12 February 2014 at 09:46
Steve Gale said…
No longer, Ali... but by the end of 2014 there will be!
12 February 2014 at 10:01
Rob said…
You could bung the older photos on iSpot and see if someone else can ID it for you. You may at least produce something useful for the record schemes with it.
12 February 2014 at 12:09
Steve Gale said…
If I still had them Rob, I would. Maybe the 'class of 2014' will end up there!
12 February 2014 at 15:23
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goldfinches and Lavender

Image
We have three medium-sized Lavender bushes in our back garden. Throughout the summer the flowers (which last for several months) are a magnet for insects and give off a most restful aroma. As tempting as it is to cut the dead stems in the autumn, we always leave them, as we know that during the late winter we will get visitors to feed on the seed heads... This video was taken from the kitchen window this morning. We will normally see one or two birds over a few days, but have had up to 14 at once. We never tire of watching them. Lavender is a wonderful plant to have in the garden, with year round natural history benefits. So what are you waiting for? They are readily available at a garden centre close to you right now! There is an historic association with Lavender in this part of northern Surrey and south London. Lavender fields have been harvested for many years, with one particular field close to Woodmansterne being very popular with day trippers. A significant proportion o...
Read more

Welcome back!

Image
In November 2005 I purchased a pair of Swarovski 10x42 EL binoculars from The London Camera Exchange shop in Guildford, for the then princely sum of £899. These bins have served me well, with almost daily use in all types of weather, testing their durability to the maximum - salt water spray, deluges of rain, 38C temperatures, dust, dirt, slight knocks... and apart from the armour coating that had started to bubble and come away from the body, nothing to be alarmed about. Then, in the summer of 2022, I noticed that I had a problem when close focusing - the outer focusing wheel would lose grip and it would take me an age to regain a middle-ground distance of focus - plus, over the next few weeks this outer focusing wheel became loose. I resorted to the use of tape to keep it all in place, but realised that I had to do something about it in the long run. For a while I did consider buying a new pair - after all, they were then 17-years old - but they were still optically superb. It seemed...
Read more

A special day

In birding, timing can mean the difference between an average day in the field and that of a spectacular one. Good timing can be helped by reading the weather conditions correctly, or understanding local conditions but it is more often down to pure luck. In this case, I just got lucky... I had not visited Dungeness since March 2022, quite a gap for me. It was high time that I once more trod the shingle and my timing of a visit was down to several factors, mostly a personal liking for mid-late autumn but also because I needed to be at home until September 20th and could not make the journey south until then. I also chose to stay at the bird observatory for a few days rather than make it a day trip. All this conveniently found me stepping outside the observatory's back door in the breaking dawn of Sunday 22nd September, quickly making my way to the fishing boats, an area I prefer to stand to best appreciate any visible bird migration, an aspect of birding that I find exhilarating.  A...
Read more