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Comment by Starcrunch | Hacker News Reader

This sounds amazing. I'd be interested to hear more details about what "stewarding 50ha of Australian bush" entails. Do you work with a local conservation organization, and do you have any particular goals for restoration or management? Do you work on documenting the biodiveristy there? Is it home to any endemic or threatened species you're espeially interested in? Any photos you could share?

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We don't work with a conservation organisation; we don't have any funding; we do it all off our own backs.

With my limited time, I document the biodiversity of our block here:

https://inaturalist.ala.org.au/observations?place_id=any&use...

My wife throws up our photos on Flickr, which includes a great many of our efforts at sustainable farming and replanting, an album documenting our house-build, as well as our hiking, and far, far too many of our dog.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/redmoonsanctuary/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/redmoonsanctuary/albums/with/7...

I think we have one or two species that are, on some level, endangered.

Our favourite species on our block is a type of orchid: https://www.flickr.com/photos/redmoonsanctuary/31446320265/i...

It's basically a sex-doll for wasps. The female wasps can't fly, they live on the ground and climb up to the top of a stalk of grass, and the male, attracted by pheromones, would swoop in and carry her off. This orchid presents a rough approximation of the shape, and a convincing approximation of the pheromones that the male wasps are confused and try to fly off with it, catapaulting them into the pollen resevoir. If they get tricked twice: viola! Pollen exchange.

That's so cool! There are some really nice photos on your Flickr, and quite a few species in that Flora and Fauna album that I've never seen before.

I'm also active on iNaturalist, and maintain a python API client and some other open source tools for it: https://github.com/pyinat/pyinaturalist

If you ever have the desire to put together some data visualizations, stats, automation, or anything else fun or useful with your iNat data, you're more than welcome to ping me for help on GitHub (jwcook) or on the iNat forums (jcook).

Thanks @Starcruch! That's pretty cool yourself. I don't think I'm in the market for doing much with my iNaturalist data - I'm content for it to just passively be part of the larger picture, though one day I suspect I will collate it all into some kind of PDF/ebook. I wish I had more time for it to be honest.

I am blown away and inspired by the straw bale house build. Well done! It must be very rewarding to see the end result.

It's lovely to live in, but it was a lot of hard, hard work. I have a sort of traumatic amnesia about it and don't have strong recollections of doing some of the work.

I joke that we outsourced it to a pair of gullible young people who did all the hard work so us older people can enjoy living in it. :-)

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