The old American Express slogan "Don't Leave Home Without it" came to mind today when my husband called with the news. He had been on a hike around our neighborhood's nature trail and had foolishly chosen not to bring his camera. He's out on the trail and there is a magnificent bird - a hawk or eagle (neither of us are particularly schooled in bird watching).
Now that my Blackberry has become an appendage, I always have something available to shoot a photo on the fly. In fact, cell phones have done a lot for digital photography (albeit maybe not the highest resolution pictures).
Over the next few weeks I will be blogging about a new partnership that we hope will be making your Virginia State Park visits more memorable. This partner is WildObs. Wildobs is a great database designed for outdoor lovers to post pictures of wildlife they observe. It is also a really cool way to find the best places to spot various types of wildlife. Our staff are loading up existing pictures of wildlife in our parks and are anxious to start having new encounters and posting them. For example, I just checked out the recent post section on the site and found this posting from Hungry Mother State Park.
Our webmaster is going to be adding a widget to all of our park pages that will show some recent observations and link to the whole list of what has been reported at the park. Soon I hope we will have pages like this one from Smith Mountain Lake State Park for all our parks.
We need your help! Sign up for WildObs and the next time you are in one of our parks, snap a shot of the wildlife and upload it. You guessed it - there's an app for that - for the IPhone and Clones. On my Blackberry I can use the regular site since it is optimized for web based phones. Or, take your high quality pictures and upload them when you get home. Your account becomes your permanent record of wildlife observations. Who needs a notebook?
Oh, if you are not so great with wildlife identification (like my husband and I), no worries. Go ahead and post that shot of the eagle or hawk or whatever it was. You can even ask the WildObs community to help you with the identification.
