The end of last week we shipped out 33,000 cards for our park staff to hand out to visitors to let them know about our partnership with WildObs and to encourage that they post their wildlife encounters in our parks to the WildObs site.
For the last year if someone mentioned wildlife photography to me, one person would leap to my mind - Crystal Thornton. Last summer Crystal worked for us at First Landing State Park and I did get to meet and spend some time with her. But perhaps I know her better from Twitter, where she is known as @rangerous. She also uses the handle rangerous on WildObs.
It's one thing to take a great shot of nature in the wild. But Crystal also knows the proper name for the creature. As an "office weanie" that's not my specialty. I'm lucky if I can identify the major species - bird, reptile, fish, mammal.
I am not sure if I found out about WildObs initially from Crystal or found it on Twitter like I found @rangerous, but Crystal has certainly been generous in her sharing of wildlife observations at our parks that she has visited. In fact, according to her profile on WildObs, she has 193 encounters posted in one year. Actually, yesterday was her WildObs first anniversary.
We have been working hard to get our staff to post observations from our parks so visitors will know what wildlife to expect to see when they visit. Crystal has certainly helped make that happen!
