 So, so just the quick overview of the project of what we're asking you to do is to take the routes that you have been assigned slash selected, do them at least three times during the active season, which is May through September, and to try and spread out those surveys. So they're not all like in the beginning of June, right? So that we get sort of a snapshot across the season. Some of you, because we were slowing switching over to this online thing and just dealing with coronavirus changes, we were late in getting things going. So I know that some of you are just getting started now. That's fine. The peak movement time during nesting season is still sort of through the next week or two. So this is a great time to be out there. I've seen some nesting turtles. We've gotten a lot of records of turtles that have been killed and some nesting turtles. And so they are out there. They are moving. And so it's a great time to get out there now. And we do still have three months if you're just getting started now. So, but I would encourage you to get out now while it's still sort of peak movement time. So we ask you to do your route, walk slowly, slowly enough. I have, I have friends that I've done this with and I have to remind them this isn't our daily exercise. This is going out to survey a route. So you do have to walk slowly so that you don't miss stuff. And do both sides of the road, walking, facing traffic against traffic. Again, safety first to make sure that you're parked in a safe place. And then if your route isn't, isn't safe, don't do it. We've got others. And then we ask that you're, what you're documenting is any vertebrate interacting with the road. So that's one of the questions that comes up. Well, is it just turtles? What exactly do you want? Do you want other animals as well? And so if you're, if you see a deer run across the road, document that. That's great. That's, we want the additional roadkill data. If you find a bird that's been killed or or a possum, we want those documents as well. Even if you never see a turtle, but you see all sorts of small mammals or birds or whatever, we want to get that too because we also, we truck roadkill generally. The other question that come along those lines, what I don't want necessarily is invertebrates. There are a lot of slugs and earthworms and a lot of insects. I do sort of out of, cause I'm a bit of a bug geek. If I see something unusual or interesting and I haven't seen anything else when I'm kind of bored, sometimes I will throw that in there, but don't stress yourself out about trying to document every bumblebee that, that you find out on the side of the road. Really, what we're trying to understand is vertebrate movements and how they're interacting with the roads and invertebrates move very, very differently from vertebrates. So, so vertebrates interacting with the road. The other thing that we're not really looking for is things, animals that aren't interacting with the road. So in the past, we've sort of had folks who are like, I'm standing next to a road and I'm birding. And so they like give me a bird list. Well, that's not really what we're looking for. If those birds aren't looking to, aren't going to be inner potentially getting hit by a car, they're just doing their own thing. I've also had people report turtles that they can see in a pond, but they can see it from the side of the road. That's not what we're looking for. I even had someone turn in a fish, which was cool because I could say we had a fish crossing a road. It was crossing under a bridge. So that's cool, but it's not really getting to what we're, what we're looking for here. So that's the basics of what we're looking for in terms of the survey. We again, we're looking for a minimum of three times about a month apart, May through September. But other big thing is, or two other big things that have come out of questions and that I've been seeing and going into iNaturalist are the, when you don't see anything, right? We want to document that. We want to know, I went out three or more times on this route and I did not see anything. The challenge is that we don't want to see that in iNaturalist and for the first year that we did these surveys, we did put them into iNaturalist because I wanted it to be easy. I wanted everything to go into one place. What we found from my own experience, because I was putting them in and from what we were hearing back from other volunteers was I spent five full minutes trying to say that I didn't see anything. That's a waste of my time, right? Nobody wants to do that. And I don't want you to spend your time doing that, but I want that negative data. And that's where we came up with this spreadsheet and I hate to have two different data sheets kind of like the digital one and then the spreadsheet. But I also felt that it's a good way to sort of QC because I've had problems with no cell reception and then I realized later, oh, that observation never went in. So if I tracked it on a spreadsheet, then I can double check and make sure that everything that I saw went in. And it's also a place to record the observations, the no observation observations. So I'm just going to pull that open. I'm going to share my screen. So this is the spreadsheet I'm talking about and it was on the link that Hannah sent and what I'll do when we send out the FAQs from this session, I'll send that as well again so you can have it digitally. You can print it out and do it by hand or you can do it all digitally. However you want, but I do want those at the end of the season and that way I can do a little bit of QC. You don't have to say what you saw if you saw 16 things on your route. Just what I want to know is your route, the name, who was there, the date and then this time spent is really important too. But first I want to say for Wildlife Observes, you can just say yes, the iNaturalist or yes, see data sheet or no, and that's good enough. This time spent is, this was the other reason that I felt this was a good thing to do to have this additional data sheet is your time is very, very valuable and we can use that to say that there's all this time put into this project and that actually counts when we're putting in for grants and things like that. We can say, look at the value of this and there's a value to your time. So you can, however you want to track your time, whether it's this is my start time, my end time, I go back and forth depending on my whim. Sometimes I put start and end times, sometimes I say 30 minutes, sometimes I say whatever it is for each route that you do. And then we actually tally all of that so we can say there was this much time put in by this many volunteers across these routes. So that was the other value to having this spreadsheet. So that is quickly the spreadsheet. Does that make sense to everyone? Just a minute, okay. Yes, yep, okay. So that was the how to do the no observation surveys that came up a couple of times and that I had been seeing in iNaturalist. The other question that came up a lot was what if I see a turtle crossing a road somewhere that isn't on my route? Do you want those? Yes, yes, yes. We want those as well. So we want any data of any turtles interacting with roads, whether it's roadkill or trying to cross the road or crossing the road because we can use that. That's additional data to help us understand where they're crossing. It will also help us tweak that model, that GIS model that we use to identify the areas that we thought there might be turtles crossing. So there's a huge benefit to having those sort of incidental observations that you see of turtles crossing the road or dead on the side of the road. The other one of the things that I have found over the last couple of years is those incidental observations have confirmed our modeling because they've shown up on sections that maybe were routes that someone didn't, hadn't taken or maybe hadn't gotten out yet. So it's been a great confirmation of our model, but I want to, I want to push that model. I want to make sure that we are using the best information. So please do document turtles that you see crossing the road or crossing the road. And then the last thing that came up was sort of smushed records. And so this is where I thought maybe we could dive into iNaturalist and we can talk about that and some of the other like nests and smushed records and things like that. So I'm now going to share my, share a different screen. Oh yes. So in the chat, someone asked about tracks. Yes. And, and we can do tracks and I'll show you some in iNaturalist. So this is the basic iNaturalist page or, you know, a little further along. If I go in and just say explore, I'm not signed in. So I can just look around. I can do whatever I want. I can look for projects, pull up our project. I've done this before. And then find it and then you can go into that project. And because I'm not signed in, there's no banner saying submit observations. Once I'm signed in that will show up. But the other thing that you can do is to explore. Which is kind of cool. So I'm just doing this the other day where you just put in wherever you want. And you can just look at records in Maine, and you can just look at turtles. So you can, there are all sorts of ways to look at the data that are in here and that's, this isn't just for turtles and it's not just for this project and isn't just for Maine. If you're going to take a trip to Thailand or if we can ever travel to Thailand, you know, go visit friends in North Carolina or something, you can look and see what's been seen and you can change the dates that you're looking for. By changing this filter, you can say, I'm only interested. I'm a bird or I'm interested in what birds I'll see. I'm going to be there for this time period, put in dates. So it's just pretty, it's pretty slick. There's a lot of stuff that you can do in here. So I'm actually going to log in. I'm still in this. So I, I have my projects. They'll come up here. Oops. Grab the wrong one. Okay. So you can now see there's this ad observations banner. So I'm now logged in. I am in this. I have been invited because again, we kept it closed. We wanted to make sure folks had, had done the, the webinar or the training to be able to come in. So that's my, that's my, that's my vision. That's my vision. But you can see over three years, we've got 800 observations, 80 species, 56 different people doing surveys and you can see they're all over the state. Actually. I'll, I'll, been a rustic is all this year. Thank you guys. That's exciting because that's a spot that we had a big old empty hole. So I wanted to actually look at, If you say, view all, then you can go all the way through every single observation. But I wanted to use this as a way to talk about some of these questions. And so here's an example of a no-observation survey, right? So it's been put in. There's no citing. Because this is, iNaturalist was designed for actual observations, it doesn't deal well with things that don't match that. And so you can't actually go into this and see what it is. I would have to go to the observers and find it and dig into it a little bit. And so it's not terribly helpful. It does come up in the, I can pull all of the data very, very easily just by exporting it and everyone can. So you all can pull all of this information as well. We do ask, and I think you all have signed the waiver that also asked the question, can I use your photographs? That's because these are great photos for me to be able to use in other presentations and workshops. And when we're doing grant proposals for the next funding, for the next project that's associated. So being able to use, I try not to use the really gruesome ones, but it is really helpful to be able to use that. So here's the no-citing type of observation that kind of doesn't really work here. Here's a great, great example of an observation. We've got the ruler that gives us scale and I will be the first to admit I am constantly forgetting scale. So I will take a couple of pictures and then have to go back and put my ruler down or put my toe in the way or something to give a sense of scale. And this can be really helpful if it's something that's hard to identify, scale can help in identification. And also in aging, especially if we do have turtles, you can say, oh, it's a hatchling or it's a first year or maybe it's an adult turtle. So the scale, it can be really, really important for that. This is a great observation. And so the first thing that happens is you put in your observation. You put in what you think that it is. And then I actually was the one who went in and I looked at that and I said, yes, that is a chipmunk. And so what will happen is you will have other folks from the iNaturalist community look at your observation and say, oh, I can verify that identification or I can help you fine tune that identification. And so once you get three confirmations, it's considered research grade. Now, this is really just anyone who happens to be in here. So there can be like some of the specialists in some of these groups are like, well, you know, you still have to look a little bit closer, dragonflies or something like that. But it's still great data and as long as there are photographs and additional information that can be really helpful. But that's the way that this works. And so if someone adds an observation to your observation or an identification, I should say, that's the way that it should go. Sometimes you get comments and I just answered one on one of my observations just the other day. Someone can put in a comment or ask you a question through the comments and you can just have a bit of a back and forth like, hey, it looks to me like there's an orange stripe where on this species it would be yellow or something like that. And you can have a little bit of back and forth. And that helps other people trying to help with identification when they see the questions that are coming through. So this is a great observation. You can see on the map where it is and follow up with who it is. It's just a fantastic example of a good observation. Here's another one that was very timely. So again, we do have turtles nesting right now. This is a nest that was dug up and this is a great example of it. And you can use your mouse and just click on it and you can zoom in and magnify it. So a predator, so a turtle built a nest, laid her eggs and then a predator came and dug them up. So what you see, all these little white bits are turtle eggs and their shells from the turtle eggs that were predated. Turtle eggs are different from bird eggs. They're not hard, calcified eggs. They are soft. And so they'll look like this most frequently. They're sort of rolled up. You can pick them up and they're papery. Over time, they actually dry out. They're sort of leathery, sort of papery, but they're flexible and soft and that is sort of perfect turtle. You can see they're sort of all over the place. Unfortunately, a turtle nest has been preyed upon, but fantastic observation, great information and a really good example of what those turtle eggs look like. I wanted to go to the smoosh question and this is an observation that I had put in. And so you see this smoosh on the road. Well, do I count that? Do I, who cares? Do I put that in? Do I not? How do I know that it's not just an oil stain? So this one, I identified as bird because you can see feathers and that's kind of all you can see. You can see sort of tissue and feathers. And so I said, I know that this was a vertebrate animal. I know it was a bird. I'm gonna put it in as a bird and that can be enough information that's helpful to someone and to help us with roadkill. And so someone else also said, yep, that's a bird and that's great. One thing that I would ask is that you try to put it into even the broadest category. If you see fur, put mammal. If you think that it's a reptile, you can't tell if it's a snake or a turtle, fine. Put in reptile. If you think it's a frog or a toad, put that in. When you don't put in a potential identification, it goes into this unknown class and I wonder if there, I know that what there are some, but I'm not sure which ones. And when you have this unknown, it doesn't, no one, so a lot of other folks using iNaturalist will look for observations that meet their project need. And so one example of that is, which I have tagged in here, is the man amphibian and reptile atlas project. So they have their project, this is all the reptiles and amphibians that have been seen across the state of Maine over, I don't remember what year, they started doing it in iNaturalist. They've been doing this for a decade. They just did it, it started in iNaturalist, maybe five, six, seven years ago. They have their project set up so that anytime anyone anywhere puts in a reptile or amphibian that's within the boundaries of Maine, that observation gets pulled in. So if it's a frog and you think it's a frog, but you leave that as an unknown, they'll never see it because you can't go through the 55 million observations or whatever that are in here. And so even getting those really basic observations are super, super helpful or the basic categories I should say. And if you leave it unknown because you really, really don't know and someone else starts putting enough people. So my bird example, if enough people said, that's a bird, you can see the feathers, it's a bird, it's a bird, it's a bird. It will switch that identification to bird, but it may take longer because you didn't sort of prime the pump. So that was sort of an obvious one to me that that was a bird, that was a smooch, that was a bird. They're not always that easy. And here was one that, I don't remember who this was, but that's tougher to tell. I don't know, this almost looks like plant material to me. So that gets a little tricky. I try and, there isn't really a rule for that. So one thing that I do look for though, you do get oil stains, you get fruits and vegetables that people have thrown out their window or that have fallen off the back of a truck. I take my little ruler and I scrape it, right? So if there's tissue there and I can get to one of those groups, I know it was something that's not an insect or an invertebrate and it's not something that wasn't an animal. I will put it in and some, and I do put in unknowns, but I try to reduce it as much as possible. Really, really busy roads that have high mortality often have these smooshes that are really hard to identify, but it's really important to still document. So there isn't a hard and fast rule. It's hard to really know. Kind of go with your gut. Do you really think that that was an animal and why? It's easy enough for me to weed out those unknowns at the end. So I would say don't kill yourself, but err on the side of being inclusive if you think that it really was an organism. I love this, I will say. We've got a couple of folks who do this in the photograph, putting in your observation name and number with a erasable pen. I love that. Don't feel like you have to. Just make sure that you put it in the question spot. And I don't remember if there were other examples on here that I wanted to show. I think that covers a lot of the basics. Let me make sure that I am going through my notes. We did the no observations, other species. Again, if you see turtles, that was what it was. If you see a turtle road kill or somewhere that's not on your route, a turtle crossing the road, put it in, submit it. In the notes section of the questions put in. Cause there is a place you can add additional notes. This is a perfect example. Not on one of my regular routes. Awesome. That is perfect. Because I wanna see that there was a road kill here and I want that data included in my data set. This is the perfect example. Not on my regular route. Fill in the other questions. This is who I am and here's the picture. That's fantastic. That's exactly how I would love to see them go in. And I think the only other thing and I'm gonna stop sharing my screen is I actually have because I have a wonderful volunteer who's been doing this for three years now and I don't think she's on with us today but she sent me bags of turtle shells. So I don't know where my, now they're a year old and so they're, they would crush and just be dust right now but they're very flexible. They curl up, they're not hard shell. And they're about, I mean, there's the size, they're sort of between like an inch and a half, two inches and what you will usually see, you usually will not see turtle shells where the turtles have successfully hatched. You will see the turtle shells where a predator has dug them up. And so it's very, it would be very unusual to find shells at a successful nest unless they were hatching out and a predator came and got some of them before they were able to hatch but usually those eggs, eggs shall stay in the nest. We do have, just as a little biology piece, you do sometimes have the hatchlings, if they hatch a little bit late in the year because they'll be hatching out at the end of the summer which is the other reason that we keep the surveys going through September, you'll get those hatchlings coming out. Sometimes if it's really cold or if they hatch really late, they'll hatch and stay in the nest through the winter and they'll hibernate in the nest and then come out in the spring. And so you end up with these hatchlings coming out in the spring and it can be very confusing because you're like, wait a second, they should have come out in the fall. So that is one of the things that you will see sometimes in the spring. So just to keep that in mind in terms of, I know that there's, because I have people who are like, I saw her nest, I saw her lead, her eggs and nobody dug it up. Where are my baby turtles? They may come out in the spring. So I don't know if we want to open it up to questions. Hannah, maybe you can tell me how to, can everybody unmute themselves at this point? Yes, people should be able to unmute themselves. So you're welcome to do that. You can also type it in the chat and I can read it out again. Yeah, there you go. Nick, did you wanna jump on or Chris? No, I was just trying to unmute. Hi. I've done so many like zoom things, but I'm usually just a participant and I'm like, oh, I don't know how to drive. Could I ask a question regarding a route that's assigned to me? If I see that there is interesting territory a little further down the road, can I do that and just add that onto the same route? Yes, and that's a great question. And that's something that I forgot to include. So these routes were identified using a GIS model. And then I did go in and try and make sure that they weren't like three miles long or 50 feet long. I tried to make them roughly half a mile, anywhere between a quarter and three quarters of a mile, basically. But when you get out there on the ground, feel free to extend it, shorten it. There are my very first route that I'm still doing after three years stops just before the pond, which is crazy. That's just part of how the curving of the clipping of the model worked. So I extend it to go all the way past that pond. So yeah, that's a great question. And that's a great thing that I really appreciate to get from you guys. You are the experts on the ground once you get out to those routes because we have not checked them out on the ground. And so I really love it if you can add that extra piece. I was actually out two weekends ago with a friend doing a route and we get all the way done and we didn't see anything, there's good habitat, didn't see anything, which is always, you know, you're like, I'm sad I didn't see anything, but I'm kind of happy I didn't see anything. I don't wanna see dead turtles, right? And then the next day in a call with all of our conservation staff, someone said, oh, around the corner from where I was surveying, the police had stopped traffic to let a snapping turtle go across the road the same weekend. So it didn't show up on my route. Maybe now next time I go out, we're gonna go around the corner and go a little bit further and now that we know that. So again, that's gonna help us tweak this model as well to know that the productivity was off the route if I had just gone another 100 feet. Thank you. Anybody else? We can also walk through putting in an observation in iNaturalist on the computer if folks wanna do that. You can use your mobile, you can use your phone. Couple of sort of tricks on that. One thing that I find, because I have a couple of routes that have absolutely no self coverage. So I do my route, I put my observations in, but I have, and there's documentation on how to do this on iNaturalist, I have the automatic upload turned off because otherwise it stands there and tries and tries and tries to upload. So I turn it off, but then I have to remember when I get home to hit the upload button. Otherwise they all just sit in my phone. The other thing that you can do if you don't have a phone, don't wanna use a phone, know there's no self coverage and it would be more of a pain than helpful is to keep track of your observations and go and put them in on the desktop when you get home. You can pull in your photos that you took with your phone or whatever and then just do all of the information right there on the phone. Does anyone wanna, do people wanna walk through that? I think it would be really helpful. Yeah, yeah. I would be good to see. Okay. Let's go back in to iNaturalist and I will go back and I actually happened to have a photo of a turtleneck and she's not near the road, but I will put it in as an example. So I'm gonna hit the banner that says add observations, right? And here is the blank form, essentially. I'm going to, right? So I start with what did you see? And it was a painted turtle. And I know it was the turtle. This species, so I'm gonna select that. It's a painted turtle. They ask if it's captured or cultivated. That's really important. If you know that this was whatever it was, because you can use iNaturalist for anything. If you're like, oh, I love my blueberry bushes, but they're not wild blueberry bushes, just put that they're cultivated. Now, before I add like when and where I saw it, I'm gonna add my photo because I believe I still have it set up to pull from the data in the picture. So I am going to put it, and yes, I have a COVID folder. So I have a painted turtle nesting. So I have pulled in that file and I'm gonna say sync the OBS with the photo metadata. And sometimes it takes a little while and so I may go in and say where I saw this. It was not Belgrade. This was, I can just say free port and it will put the dot there. I can then move this or I can put an address and it will put it right there. Now, if I was like, oh, I wasn't actually there, but I can't quite tell. So I'm gonna turn on the satellite so that I can see because that other map doesn't have a lot of features to use. So I know from the satellite map that I was actually over here, I'm gonna put that dot right there, which is where I actually saw it. So that is now my observation location. Sometimes when you pull in your information from your phone, if you were in a place that doesn't have good cell coverage, that dot is not in the right place. Just make sure, like just go in and make sure that it's not in the middle of the pond, that it's on the road or wherever you were when you saw it. The date that I saw it was, maybe it was on Saturday. And then female, nesting on a trail. So any basic notes, because I'm in the project when I put this in, I get all of the questions, right? So this is not on route. I'm gonna change the date. Sand ship is free port, playing fields, really basic information and nesting, that also helps the main amphibian reptile atlas to have little bits of information like that, nesting, hit on the side of the road, stuff like that. And that's it. And then you have to remember to save. I have done that where I just walk away and my observation is gone and it does not prompt you. It doesn't say, wait a second, you didn't say if this is gonna be lost. So make sure that you save the observation. And it will go in. And it hasn't pulled my photo yet for some reason. And that's another thing that there are a few glitches in this. Sometimes it takes like an hour to pull this in or something like that. Just if you find glitches like this, make sure that you go back and make sure that they got straightened out. I have seen this multiple times where I then spend 10 minutes going, where's my photo, where's my photo? It just hadn't pulled in to the observation yet. So other folks can now come in and take a look at that photo once it pulls in and say, this is a painted turtle. This is great. The main amphibian reptile project can then pull it in to their project as well. And it will show up in the recent observations. So that's how to do it from here. And yes, go ahead, Chris. You didn't answer the questions about live or dead in life's stage. Yes, let me see if I can go into this. I don't know, what are we supposed to? You know what, that's a new thing that they've just added. I'm completely out of the habit of doing that. It is very helpful. So that is something that I have on my to-do list. Thank you for reminding me because I do want to. I'm gonna go into my observations and go to that one. And actually, that's a great reminder too that I can go in because it's mine. I can hit the edit button. And that opens it back up for me to answer any of those questions. See, they don't come in if you go in after the fact. And you know what, those might be, I'm trying to remember now. Yes, go ahead. You see him? Gonna move your faces. Yeah, I think it's behind the faces. They're not showing on my screen at this point. And I think that that's a main amphibian reptile thing that they've asked us to film. So it's like their questions coming through. So it is, it's very helpful. That's something new this spring that they put in there and I'm completely out of the habit of, because I usually do it through my phone. But yes, it is very helpful. It's very helpful for them because then they can pull from that field when they pull the data. So yes, thank you very much for that reminder because it is really helpful to add that. Otherwise they have to go through the blanks at the end and try and sort them out. So yes. And the questions are like alive or dead. Was it nesting or was there breeding behavior? And that's so that they can again, try and figure out, was this just a frog that was here? Or is this a frog breeding? Or again, a troll that's been hit by the road. Thank you. Any other questions on doing observations through iNaturalist? Any other questions? And I can pop out of this so I can see you all. Let me, I can do it like that. Other questions, comments. Input, we've been doing this for three years and every single year we find stuff that's helpful. We go, oh gee, the way that Joe Schmo did it was super helpful. Is it possible to do this too frequently? Like do you suggest once a month? But can you do it more often? You absolutely can do it more often. In fact, the once a month is a minimum. The more you can be out there, the better because again, and depending on your road, if you have a lot of active scavengers, you can miss stuff or if it's a very, very busy road, something that maybe you could identify as a turtle on day one by day 27, you either can't identify or it's been taken away by something else or it's been hit again and knocked out of your sort of observation view. So yeah, as often as you can go, there's a ton of literature where folks are still trying to figure out how often you survey, what's effective, what statistical models are you using. This is really at sort of the most base level of data collection to get statistical significance for a lot of this stuff you have to have sort of regular surveys, estimate your scavenger removal rate, try and estimate how long the organism was there so that you can have a better, so that you can try and estimate numbers. What we're trying to get at is if you did this minimum amount of surveying and it's a really bad site, you're gonna find something. So we're trying to sort of get at that like not too bad or not bad at all site and really bad site because it's the really bad sites that if they're really bad, you're gonna see it once a month but the more information, the better, yeah. And especially with, this is a weird year, right? There's less traffic because people are stuck at home with COVID-19 and actually there's a reporter who just emailed me yesterday. There are reports coming out and one came out of Maine by Greg LeClaire up at Unity. He does survey work around amphibians moving to vernal poles and their mortality rate on roads and he said the mortality rate was cut in half this year because there are fewer cars on the road. So with that lower mortality, you may miss a turtle that survives crossing the road but if you're out there more often, you might be there when that animal is actually moving. And so the more you can be out there, the less you're gonna miss kind of a thing. So that's kind of a really long answer to your question. Okay, I have a question. What's the best time? Is there a better time to be on a routes morning, evening, afternoon? You know, not necessarily. I always go with what the safest time is. So if it's a busy road during rush hour, that's not a great time. And if it's too dark, that's not a great time. Often with reptiles and amphibians in particular, if it's just recently rained, getting out the next day is helpful. Whenever you're gonna have the most visibility, both of you for safety and of the critters that are out there. Scavengers tend to work dawn and dusk. And so, but I don't know what that tells you in terms of when you should get out there, right? So anytime during the day, you're gonna get the ones that the evening scavengers haven't picked up, but if they came at two a.m., you're gonna miss those. So it's really about when is it safest for you and easiest for you to be able to see stuff. And part of that goes along with the safety piece too. Sometimes the animal's in the middle of the road. And if it's the busiest time of day, you're not gonna be able to get over there and take a picture. I've taken pictures from the side of the road, but you can't quite tell what that is quite as well. And so maybe in those lower, lower traffic times. And whatever works for you, because we're asking you to give your time to do this. Some people, it's before they go to work. Sometimes some people it's in the evening when they get home and some people it's Saturday. I take my 10 year old out. He's seeing a lot of roadkill, but gets us out there. So whatever works for you, it doesn't seem to be, and there have been folks who are looking at that sort of thing. There doesn't seem to be a huge, oh my God, it's gotta be between 10 and two during the day. All right, thank you. Yep. Anybody else? Sarah, can you just briefly talk about, especially if we're gonna share this with our people too, I think it's worth talking about. If someone were walking and finds an injured turtle, at what point should they do something and what they should do from them? Yes, if it's an injured turtle, there are, take it to a rehabber. Avian Haven and what's the other wild? Do you remember the name, Hannah? Center for Wildlife. Thank you, the Center for Wildlife. Those are a couple of places that take in animals. They will, even Avian Haven will take turtles and call them because some of them actually have volunteers who will come out and pick up the animal for you. Just put it in a little box, maybe on a towel, keep it close to keep it dark and keep them calm. Other animals, you're gonna worry about safety, right? Your own and theirs. And so sometimes we think, oh, this poor injured animal, they're gonna be defensive. And so you can really get hurt in trying to handle an animal that is injured. So you would wanna call one of those rescue places or IF&W actually has a list. And I think we have them now linked on our turtle page to where you can, every, I wanna say every county has a rehabber through IF&W. And they're authorized and certified through IF&W. They actually go through a training, they have to get permitting. And so you can just go to that list and call those folks and they'll come out depending on who it is and where you are. Some of them will come out to you, others will ask you to bring it to them. So think about safety. Deer, raptors, large animals can really, really, really hurt you. Anything that can bite, if it's, but a turtle, do your best, some of them bite. If it's a snapper, if it's a big snapper, maybe, don't worry, call someone and have them take care of it. But some of the painted turtles are the most common turtles that we see. Snappers being second most common. They actually can do some cool stuff with epoxy with turtles. They glue their shells back together. If they've been hit by a car and it's really just that structural, if there is an internal damage, they're able to rescue those turtles and just glue their shells back together and they can live 50 more years. So depending on the nature of the injury, they can do some amazing work. Thank you, Hannah. That was a really good question. Anybody else? What are you guys struggling with? Finding enough time to go out and look for, yeah, and it is, it's discouraging. Like I said, I went out with my friend, we didn't see anything and we were like, geez, we walked all the time, we didn't see anything. We were like, I'm kind of glad we didn't see anything. Cause when you do, you're like, oh yeah, there's something in there. And you're like, oh, it's a dead turtle. It's a dead snake. It's a dead, whatever. But the information that you're gathering is super, super helpful and really important. And again, this information is used by DOT and by towns to try and improve road mortality because even if their focus isn't on preventing wildlife roadkill, it's a public safety thing. Even small animals can cause a public safety hazard. We tend to think hitting a deer is a dangerous thing. Avoiding a turtle is a dangerous thing. And so we want to avoid anyone being in that situation really. There's a terrible video from the Midwest somewhere, maybe it was Minnesota or Wisconsin. And it was like a DOT camera over a highway, six lane highway and it's make way for ducklings. Here comes this mama duck walking across six lanes and cars are swerving and they're slamming on their brakes and it takes a full, good couple of minutes for them to get across. And there are no accidents and everybody safe and is the most harrowing video. And the DOT says and the police say, I hate to say this, but you may have to just hit them. Like you have to think about the fact that you slamming on the brakes could cause a huge accident. And so we want those ducks to not be there. We want to give them a way to safely move without having to risk their lives and all of our lives. And so that's our main goal. And if that takes some of us having to look at and poke at roadkill, we can make a difference. And I think I've mentioned, depending on when you all started, DOT has been working with IF&W for a couple of years now down in Elliott on the worst turtle crossing road segment in the entire state. I went out with IF&W and DOT and in like two hours, we found 35 dead turtles in this mile long segment. It was extremely discouraging. IF&W got DOT after a couple of years of wrangling and contracts and things like that. They put up fencing along that stretch. And so now it just went in, I think the end of last year there's been no mortality that I've heard of yet this year. And then in the next couple of years, they're gonna expand the culverts that cross there's huge wetlands on both sides so that they will be able to, they wanted to just keep them off the road, keep the mortality down and then they'll be able to pass safely once this new culvert goes in. But that's the outcome of people going out and finding a lot of dead turtles on the road. So it really can take time. It can be very frustrating, but the results are real. And even the, if you've ever been in a place that has the turtle signs, turtle crossing signs, that's because those go up when IF&W determines that there are a lot of turtles being killed in one place and they will put up those signs and the signs are effective. They make people pay attention. So each little turtle that we find or don't find goes towards that end. Sarah, Chris just asked in the chat how many routes are not being surveyed? Oh, well we have over 3,000 routes in the state. So it's, again, they're identified using a GIS model. So these are little snippets sort of anywhere in the state that have wetlands of a certain type within a certain configuration relation, certain distance from a road. So there are thousands of potential segments. We have over a hundred being surveyed this year by you guys and your fellow surveyors and that's sort of the average for every year that we get sort of a hundred being surveyed. Some of them are repeat routes. Some of them folks have said, I've been surveying this route for two years and I have not seen a single thing. Do you have anything else? So we do switch folks around and give them new routes and we have people doing multiple routes and people doing just one route. All of it helps. I'm doing a route I've been doing for years right by my house and I've got four new routes this year that I haven't done. So just trying to cover some of these interesting spots. I have a question. Yep. I'm in the county. Long 95, there are, they look like about a foot diameter drainage tile but they have flaps on one end but it's the road end and they open up to the road. Are those anything pertaining to this? Because if it is, it's backwards. Yeah. I am guessing that it has to do with drainage, that it's a road infrastructure question as opposed to this. It's laying right on top of the angle of the side of the road. Somebody just placed them on. There's like five of them. From Holton to Oakfield. I have no idea what purpose they serve. One of the doors is actually knocked off on one of them but they open out to the road and the flaps are on the road side. It's on the interstate. So I haven't stopped to look and see what the whole thing is but it can't be drainage because it would go underneath it. Right. I don't know off the top of my head. That doesn't sound like any wildlife crossing structure because as you say, it sounds completely backwards but I can reach out to D.O.T and I'll see what I can find out. Thank you. Yeah. And that actually brings up another good point that all these routes that you guys have, we've excluded the highways, the interstates because it's illegal to walk along them and it's dangerous to walk along them but we know that there's a ton of mortality happening on the highways. And we are, you know, D.O.T is a partner with us and so we're trying to get them to do a little more targeted work document what they see. You know, there are crews that go out and they see stuff and we're trying to get them to just put it in their phone, you know, just as simple as that but they have a lot to do. So they just documenting every squirrel that they see that on the side of the road. We're not gonna get our profits though. So we do try and get as much information from them. And again, D.O.T is a partner on this and so they have folks who do pay attention to roadkill stuff but that is one huge gap is in my view and we know that that's where the most mortality happens. Yeah. Okay. Hannah, do you have more thoughts, questions, blatant things? I don't think so. I mean, I think I was just checking and I think everybody is part of our naturals here but if you aren't, you can just send me an email and I can get you out of it. But again, I think most people are. And then I also, if you had signed up, I mailed, you should have gotten mailed copies of your maps. There are a couple of people who I think just signed up. Lisa, yours just went out so you should get that in the next few days. Okay, great. But I think everybody else, they were mailed out if you had requested that. Yeah. So is everyone trying a naturalist? Has anyone had problems, questions? It took me, I mean, I, now that I'm in it, I love it and I do all kinds of other juicy stuff. Like I'm kind of a bug nut and so I have, you know, all the moths up my plate. So I think that I know it's cool but it took me a while to get used to it, especially with the mobile app. And there, I will say one thing for them, their help desk is fantastic. So I had some issues with being in a place with no cell service. I think it was the two years ago. And if it couldn't upload, it then, when I put in the next observation, it overwrote the last one that hadn't been uploaded. That's not good. And I put that in there, you know, wrote to the help desk. Guy got back to me within 24 hours. They fixed the bug. He told me to remove the app, reinstall the app and the problem was gone. So they're really responsive. They want this to be a good thing. They're trying to improve it all the time. They do make some changes that take, you know, you just have to pay a little attention but I'm, I am really a fan of iNaturalist, but it is, there is a learning curve that you do have to get over a little bit. And do you have a question? Yeah. A lot of my roots, I've seen nothing. I think I've only seen anything. So I've written it down my times and dates and stuff in the root, which I'll mail in, but I couldn't figure out how to put saw nothing on that root, on iNatural. Yes. So we, the very first year we tried to do all of the, all observations, including all surveys, including the new observation surveys through iNaturalist, but we found that it doesn't work. Let me see if I can minimize, you guys, then. We might have missed that when we were first talking about it. I saw you talking about it, but I, Yeah. So we can log it in. Yeah. And so we're not doing that in iNaturalist because it really was designed for actual observations and it doesn't, it doesn't work well to track. So there's no, you can't now turn this and pull up, like you can't even pull up the observations. Sorry, Sarah, we're getting, there's some feedback. I'm wondering if people can mute themselves if possible. Awesome, thank you, Nana. So when there's a, when there's a picture, I can click on it and go see that observation where there's nothing, I can click it all day long. I can't get into that observation. And so you may have filled in a ton of information and notes. I can't get to it except by going through the members and looking through the individual observations that way. And so we found that iNaturalist just isn't, it wasn't designed for surveys to capture negative data. And so we just said, don't even put anything in iNaturalist. And again, if you're doing it on your mobile app and I, it drove me crazy. So I was like, we're changing this. After the first year, I was like, we're changing this because you spend all this time putting in your date and putting in your, who you are. And you're like, just, just to say it and see anything. So I don't want people spending time doing that. I want people like, like serving going along, along the roads and not being frustrated. So all you need to do is put it in the, that spreadsheet. I don't know if I'm, I don't think you guys can, can you see the spreadsheet now? Are you still seeing iNaturalist? Yeah, I think I stopped share. Yeah, so if you put it in here, that's all we need. And I will keep track of that because I pull. So what I do on the other end is I download all the data out of iNaturalist. I can set the dates, I can pull the locations and then I can pull that into GIS. And then I take that spreadsheet and I add all of these zero observations. And I add all of the data from folks who didn't use iNaturalist, who just used the paper forms. We have a few people who do that. And so I have my database that's separate. And so I can add all of that from the spreadsheet. So we can leave it out of iNaturalist for now. Anything else? This is Lisa, thanks so much. Will you send me the spreadsheet so I can have that in case I run into any? Yeah, perfect. And what I'm gonna do is we're gonna pull together a FAQ basically from this conversation and from the questions I've had emailed to me and some of the things that I'm seeing. And we'll post it on the website and we will also send it out to you all. And I want to send that spreadsheet with the FAQ as well. Cause I, yeah. And because we shifted after the first, the first year we did have everyone put it into iNaturalist and then we shifted last year. And so we had to sort of add an extra blip actually, I should. So we do have these volunteer guidelines that if you went to a workshop, it was in your folder. If not, it was a thing that Hannah sent. And so we tried to add in, cause this was already built and created. And so we tried to sort of add an extra line here. There's a spreadsheet for this, but it's not front and center in a lot of other scenarios because it was an add-on afterwards. So it's something that we definitely, going forward, if we get a digital funding to keep this project going, we'll sort of revamp where that comes in. Okay. That's great. Well, thank you very much. Thank you. Looking forward to getting out there. So it is five after one. Any last minute questions or thoughts? That was great. Thank you. Well, thank you all for volunteering. Seriously, it's a crazy year and I really appreciate you guys for doing. And if you have any questions, you can email me or Hannah and we'll get back to you. And as I say, we will put out the FAQs and we'll send around that spreadsheet again as well. Alrighty. Well, thank you all. And I hope everyone is having as beautiful a day as we are here down in Southern Maine. So hopefully everyone can get out and enjoy it a little bit. Thank you. Take care. Thank you all. We look forward to seeing what you see.