“If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly noticeable, those things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable”,
Rainer Marie Rilke – Letters to a young poet.
This is a personal site for displaying my observations of nature in Cambodia. Unless otherwise stated (i.e. when I am showing contented created by others), all content (including photos) is copyrighted using Creative Commons By Attribution (CC BY), which means it is free to use, as long as you attribute it to me. I hope you will find the site interesting, informative and useful.
The site includes:
- A filterable list of observations
- A number of checklists of my observations
- Most recently added taxa
- A search/navigation facility for taxa.
Background
I am Gerard Chartier (a.k.a. Gee) and I am a very keen (some might say, “obsessed”) amateur naturalist. I am an Englishman, who has been living in Cambodia since 2009. I have always had an interest in nature but it did not really develop until I came to Cambodia and was so immersed in nature at Rainbow Lodge (an eco-lodge in Tatai Commune, Koh Kong Province), where I lived for eight years. I was first attracted by the beautiful butterflies here and started photographing them. My curiosity was piqued and I wanted to find out what species they all are. That was the start of my efforts to learn about and document as much of the nature around here as I can. I have been doing so ever since.
In late 2017, I started using iNaturalist for recording my observations, but I was a very casual user, recording only 51 observations in the first two years. In June 2019, I started added more concertedly, but only moths, following a request to add to the Moths of Cambodia project. In September 2019, I started adding new observations and later that year I decided to make iNaturalist the primary platform for recording my observations, and I started working on my backlog. I have over 60000 nature photos and I am still taking new ones, so there is still so much to be done!
After making the decision to focus on iNaturalist, I also decided to develop a WordPress plugin to allow me to show my iNaturalist content on this site (I was a software engineer prior to moving to Cambodia). This now means that my website will always be up-to-date with the observations I post in iNaturalist (updated automatically on a daily basis).
As the data shown here are sourced from iNaturalist, the taxonomy here also matches that of iNaturalist. This is not always what I would choose to use but it enables me to keep my website going without a huge investment of time and effort (aside from all the work I have already put into developing the plugin), which I can then use to try to get more of my photos identified and more observations uploaded to iNaturalist, and, therefore, to this site.
There are not many checklists on the site at the moment and a couple of those are incomplete because I am still adding the data to iNaturalist. I hope to complete those checklists soon, and I will be adding more over time. I find them very useful for comparing similar species and I hope you do, too.
The site supports subscription to taxa. So, if you are interested in a particularly taxon, you can subscribe to it and you will receive a daily digest of changes to that taxon and all of its descendent taxa (if any changes have occurred).