Diario de joaotiagotavares

It was Jacques Yves-Costeau's fault. And Félix Rodrigues de la Fuente’s too. It was watching their documentaries in the early 1980s that I became fascinated by living things, and by their diversity. To know their names and to know how to tell them apart. In the University, some friends (Octávio Mateus, Catarina Azinheira or Dinis Geraldes, was one or all of them?) showed me their field notebooks, and I easily gave in to the need not only to know, but to record everything I saw, all the living things I could find. And then, lists, something that came out naturally, I'm not sure why. I become obsessed with listing all the birds and other creatures, and more. I tell regular people I am a biologist, and I biologists who do not understand why it fascinates me to know one more scientific name that I am a naturalist, an old school one. A few decades have passed and iNaturalist appeared. A tool FOR SCIENCE AND CONSERVATION: here I can record what I see, and people (who know how to identify the things I don't know) help me to know more, more names, more characteristics, to know the distributions patterns and more, to acquaint myself with new forms of life. And there are many.
And images, which have always been part of me and of my relationship with the world, have always been an obsession, starting with drawing and moving to amateur (record) photography, now has a purpose. Now, I can use my photos to record, in space and time, the living beings that are always around us. Always, even when we neither see nor think about them.
And I keep inserting records and, without knowing how, there are TEN THOUSAND records. The 10.000th: a wild tulip, since in recent years botany has slowly emerged as an interest.
Of these 10K, 6787 records are identified to the species level, and only 4828 have been confirmed by experts and other naturalists.
These are only the first 10,000, I hope.
More than anything, I would like to thank the naturalists who contributed most to validate and identify my records: @valter (Valter Jacinto), @mjcorreia (prof. Maria João Correia), @mercantour, @maremimar (prof. Maria Emília Martins ) and @zaca (zacarias), are only the first 5 out of a total of 927 identifiers, to whom I owe a lot of appreciation).