Amphibians and Reptiles

[Pleiades]

I'm going to have TONS of post it notes in my guide. My field guide decided to leave out all the stuff on anatomy, behavior, and diet so i'm going to have to add that plus other things that i cant think of right now. It's going to end up being so messy and unorganized with all these post it notes. plus, theres like no room to add anything in my field guide. I find it odd how they allow you to make a guide in fossils but no amphibians

[gneissisnice]

You might just want a new field guide if it doesnt have any of that stuff.

[dickyjones]

I'm just curious as to how they define field guide. I really don't need anything for identification, so I'd rather bring a large book on general herpetology, cover most of the published pages up using large post it notes, and make my own notes on all of the individual specimens. And if they don't allow regular books, I'll just find the largest 'field guide' and do the same. Basically, that new rule is just forcing us to place our binders in a different package. So it's more of a pointless inconvenience than anything.

[rocketman1555]

i don't see why they wouldn't allow binders, you could always make your notes and then have them bound in a different method, its harder, but it would work

[dickyjones]

I don't think your own notes bound in any way would count as a 'published field guide'. Unless you manage to get someone to publish it officially for you.

[fleet130]

I really don't need anything for identification, so I'd rather bring a large book on general herpetology, cover most of the published pages up using large post it notes, and make my own notes on all of the individual specimens. And if they don't allow regular books, I'll just find the largest 'field guide' and do the same. Basically, that new rule is just forcing us to place our binders in a different package. So it's more of a pointless inconvenience than anything.

I don't mean to pick on you, but it's this type of "lawyering" that drives stupid rule changes. The process is a little more involved but that's the major reason. I understand why and how the process works, but I don't have an acceptable solution.

[rocketman1555]

I don't think your own notes bound in any way would count as a 'published field guide'. Unless you manage to get someone to publish it officially for you.

most of our notebooks for this contain more information than any published field guide, the works cited would be the hardest part of it to get published

[Deeisenberg]

This could work to the advantage of the creative loop hole lookers, and that is never a good idea.

[rocketman1555]

i know, but requiring the use of a published field guide severely hampers some teams because they add so much to their own binders, that a field guide won't cover nearly as much as most people would like, and my personal opinion, they should either take out all resources or allow all published and student made, because the published ones just don't cut it

[dickyjones]

You can count on all of the top teams doing something similar to what I said with the rules said that way. I actually thought the rules kind of encouraged something similar to that.

Anyways, I'm planning on making plenty of rule clarifications before I do anything, especially on what constitutes a 'field guide'. Also interested on what can be attached...like pictures of specimens that your field guide doesn't cover.

Edit: Rocketman posted before me. I strongly agree that no guides would be better than published guides. I don't want to get destroyed by another team just because they found some great field guide that no one else ever heard of before, so I'm hoping that they'll allow lots of modifications to our guides. But there's nothing we can do now with the rules already made, so I'm just trying to make this work as well as possible. I'm in the mindset that resources should be more safety blankets than your primary means of answering questions so this isn't a huge problem, but I still would like my blanket to be as good as possible.