Recent (and not so recent) Activities

It’s obviously been quite some time since I posted regularly. I’ve enjoyed going through the “on this date in…” posts in the sidebar since I installed the widget some time back (it appears I currently have no December 2nd entries from prior years – so I guess this will make at least one to look at on 2 Dec 2012 – more if I catch up on photojournals by then). Makes me feel a little regret about all the things I’ve missed getting into the blog over the past several months – at some point I’ll fill in some of gaps a bit with photojournal pages (over 10000 images yet to process from the past 3 years, though many of those will end up deleted, so I’m sure I’ll be caught up in no time!), but many thoughts and observations have already been lost.

I have been working on some things of relevance to the nature stuff I mostly talk about here – in particular, I’ve been spending a lot of time on the Natural History of Southeast Alaska wiki over the past few weeks. I’ve made good progress with the birds, now with reasonable species lists for several communities in Southeast (though Sitka’s is as yet incomplete). I’ve also been working on getting the underlying templates and forms set up so they are user friendly for others. I’m hoping to begin recruiting others to contribute observations and insight from throughout Southeast Alaska. I feel like I’ve made a lot of progress recently, though there is still much to go. Anyone interested in checking out what’s there can visit the wiki at http://wiki.seaknature.org/. For now it’s not possible to edit anything without having me create and account first (an easy way to avoid spamming) – so on the off chance anyone reading this has an interest in contributing, let me know and I can get things set up for you to do so.

Looking forward, I’ve been getting interested in revisiting the 1000 Species project I attempted in 2007. I ultimately shifted focus to the wiki – spending more time pulling together species lists from various resources. I have been using the wiki to keep track of documented species – I’m up to 643 in the wiki (with probably 100 or more still waiting in the backlog of photos I have yet to process). In any case, for some reason I’ve been feeling inspired to make another attempt at noticing at least 1000 species (in the Sitka area) during a calendar year. If I go ahead with this project, I’ll set up something in the wiki that makes it easy for me to note an observation and have a running tally automatically kept. It was too much work to write a blog entry for each species, and I think that was a significant part of why I didn’t keep up last time. No telling whether I can manage to keep up this time either, but I figure with lower maintenance record keeping, I at least have a better chance.