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I'll admit that the field guide itself is going to probably go unused. The post-it notes and taped in notes/diagrams are probably all I'm going to use. I'm going to check a couple different field guides and check amount of general info vs. species information vs. pages and then decide. Right now I'm starting to go through like 5 different books and check to make sure all the info for every specimen is in my add-on notes. I've been sort of ignoring this event in favor of some of my others, but I'll be getting back to work now.

We are going with the petersons, because my partner prefers it, as do most other people in the event excluding me (I like the audubon). Also the petersons is mentioned as THE suggested resource in the rules, so it is slightly more likely that questions will come directly from it (though we will probably mostly use our notes as well). We did finish our petersons, and wrote in tiny handwriting in the margins EVERYTHING in the way of of taxon pages into the book. I htink that for the purposes of clarity, due to the clarification made by dicky, we will go the way of scanning our binder pages with ocr. Then we will reformat the pages so that they can fit directly over the petersons page and attach them with double sided tape. We think this will be the quickest way, and it will also improve the easiness of navigation through the book, and finding information.

Flavorflav wrote:

EcoFreak wrote:I love this event, but I have a question. Does anyone else have snakes in devision B? We arn't suppost to, but we seem to every year. please respond.

Where did you get the idea that you aren't supposed to have snakes in division B? You had them last year (which was the first time this event has run since 2001) because you ARE supposed to.

We got an e-mail from the head honcho of our area's compotition saying there would be no snakes. Then the test writers put their part off until (and I mean this literaly) minutes before the competition, and guess what every other question was about. The thing they told us we didn't have to study for. So my coach and I had a concern. We are studying for snakes this time just in case the test writers are lazy again.

EcoFreak wrote:

Flavorflav wrote:

EcoFreak wrote:I love this event, but I have a question. Does anyone else have snakes in devision B? We arn't suppost to, but we seem to every year. please respond.

Where did you get the idea that you aren't supposed to have snakes in division B? You had them last year (which was the first time this event has run since 2001) because you ARE supposed to.

We got an e-mail from the head honcho of our area's compotition saying there would be no snakes. Then the test writers put their part off until (and I mean this literaly) minutes before the competition, and guess what every other question was about. The thing they told us we didn't have to study for. So my coach and I had a concern. We are studying for snakes this time just in case the test writers are lazy again.

I don't think laziness has anything to do with it. The mistake was not in having snakes, but telling you that you wouldn't. I can't see any reason why a region would decide not to test on snakes. They are a pretty major group of reptiles, after all.

Flavorflav wrote:

Ecofreak wrote: We got an e-mail from the head honcho of our area's compotition saying there would be no snakes. Then the test writers put their part off until (and I mean this literaly) minutes before the competition, and guess what every other question was about. The thing they told us we didn't have to study for. So my coach and I had a concern. We are studying for snakes this time just in case the test writers are lazy again.

I don't think laziness has anything to do with it. The mistake was not in having snakes, but telling you that you wouldn't. I can't see any reason why a region would decide not to test on snakes. They are a pretty major group of reptiles, after all.

I completely agree

I hate that we can't use a binder, because now all of our info for A+R is scattered in 3 field guides + my partner and I have to transfer all the info into one of them, + take more notes on top of the ones we had to transfer.

+ everything has to be put on post-it notes so that people w/ bad-handwriting are screwed (me included).

+ the partner who took the notes last year has kinda-messy handwriting and I can't read some of the stuff he wrote.

The only comforting thing is that every1 is going to have to do this.

We put like a billion post its in our field guide, but then the worst happened and all them came out...... Im not blaming anyone.......just my partner

Just a point to put out for discussion:

What is everyone putting on their "thousands of post-it notes"? It seems to me that both the Peterson and Audubon guides are pretty loaded with information. I can see adding some notes on really crucial things, but isn't having a ton of extra information just going to clutter up your field guide? The more information in your book, the harder it is to find things.

I think outlines work better for events like this where you can quickly go to the topic you're looking for and find the information you can need, so I'm basically adding all of the information from both field guides and extra sources to the book in a more organized form. And ALL field guides are usually highly lacking in general information, so I'm sure there'll be a ton of that to add. The idea for me is to know the field guide well enough by competition that I don't really need it and when I do, I can find it quickly from remembering where I saw that before. I generally see event resources as a safety net, and I prefer to have as large of one as possible.

adam124218 wrote: The more information in your book, the harder it is to find things.

Yeah, but then you just add an index, + the more info you have the better you'll place. In my region/state they usually also give us plenty of time to answer the question, so its not usually a problem.