Gordon Murphy

Joined: Oct 1, 2020 Last Active: Feb 22, 2024 iNaturalist

I have a degree in Biology from UofSC and spent the first 18 years of my professional career as a zookeeper, starting out at Riverbanks Zoo and Garden in 1973 and finishing up that career path at White Oak Conservation Center, in north Florida, in 1991. For the last 30 years I have been an environmental scientist at various engineering firms, performing wetland delineations, protected species surveys, and habitat assessments for airport and roadway projects throughout the southeast.

My hobbies include flat-water kayaking (swamps), birding, botanizing, collecting minerals, flipping tin and rolling logs in search of herptiles, and travel to Central and South America to enjoy the flora and fauna. I have been an active member of the SC Association of Naturalists (SCAN, www.scnaturalists.org) for the past 16 years, 9 of which I served as President.

My wife and I own 10 acres of land in northern Richland County (SC) where we have made our home for almost 40 years (except for the two years in north Florida). We spend a lot of time walking around the land with our dogs, and last year I decided to start documenting the flora and fauna on our property with iNaturalist. It is not my goal to map every individual occurrence of a species on the property, but to develop a list of what occurs here and map representative individuals. The bottomland portion of the property is always full of surprises as flood waters often deposit seeds of plants that do not regularly occur here, so we are always look forward to Spring to see what the floodwaters have brought us. We are actively eliminating the unwanted invasives and it is a constant battle. The property is dominated by hardwoods with a scattering of pines and cedars.

I got involved with digital photography early on, before location data was stored in the photograph metadata, therefore many of my fauna locations are manually placed on the map. It is easy to manually place the occurrences as I have two feeding stations offering a variety of seed and suet for birds, I have tin out for herptiles, and we maintain several brush piles for wildlife use. Interesting insects and moths are commonly seen on our front and back porches at night making it easy to map their locations. My wife’s flower beds have attracted many pollinators over the years so these are easy to map as well.

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