Pokémon Go, but with real animals: my experience with dobudex

We found dobudex during a weekend away with the family. We were in the middle of the countryside, so the timing was good. My first animal was a butterfly, a small white. It turned into a really nice scan.

What struck me afterwards was that I did not know the names of most animals. Now I suddenly know a great many.

The difference with Pokémon Go

When a friend asks what it is, I compare it to Pokémon Go. Everyone went out into the street for that one too. The difference is where you look. With Pokémon Go you look at your screen, with dobudex at the bushes and the sky. You walk around searching, and that is how you find out how many animals live around you.

Big animals are the easiest. A dog, or an alpaca if you drive past a farm. Birds I never knew the species of. Insects you have to go looking for, and they rarely sit still enough for a good scan. Which makes it all the better when it works.

I do not like insects

The strangest part to me is that I do not like insects at all. I used to want anything that landed on me off me as fast as possible. Now I try to scan it first. If that fails, I let the thing walk onto a leaf until I have it properly in frame.

I also pay more attention to where I walk. Yesterday I went to do the shopping and saw something small and red sitting on a bush, a firebug. And I immediately think: I want that one.

In my own garden there had been what I took for one orange butterfly fluttering about for years. It turned out to be three, all of them a different species.

That happens often. You have no idea how many kinds of something exist. Take flies. My Dex has a bluebottle, a hoverfly and a green bottle fly in it. I had no idea there were that many variants.

The fact that stayed with me most is about prairie dogs. I knew they squeak, but their vocal range turns out to be so wide that they pass on to each other what is coming, down to the colour and the size of it. The rest hear from that whether they need to run. To us it all sounds the same. To them it is the difference between living and not.

160 animals, and a bit of cheating

There are about 160 animals in my Dex now. Although I cheated a little, because I went to the zoo. That is also where my best card comes from.

It is a puffin, beautifully framed with its wings out and a head that looks like it is laughing. Even so, an animal you get in front of the lens yourself, in the wild, is more satisfying.

So my favourite is a hummingbird hawk-moth. That is a moth that hangs in front of flowers as though it were a hummingbird. I had never seen one before, but my mother-in-law came across them more often in her garden. So we went hunting together, and at some point it came flying in. Such an unusual creature, and sharp in the frame as well. That is the one I am proudest of.

The swift I threw away myself

What I am still hunting is a swallow. Or a swift, or a martin. Which one it turns out to be does not matter to me, because I cannot tell them apart, and that is half of why I want one: I am curious what the app will say it is. But first I just want one at all.

The frustrating part is that I see them flying so often, only always too high. You take a scan and it turns out to be a dot.

It worked once. A common swift, according to the app. Except we doubted whether that was right, because it looked fairly big in the image, and the birds flying up there are small. I want to keep my Dex as truthful as I can, so I deleted the scan.

When I tried again later, a man happened to walk past. “What lovely swifts those are. Are you taking photos of them?”

So it had been a swift after all. And I have not managed it since, because they stayed too high. My tip: do not throw a scan away because you are unsure.

What annoys me about dobudex

Sometimes I am concentrating on aiming at one small creature and something easier walks past behind it at exactly that moment. A swan, for instance. That one is easy to recognise, so the scan goes to it. I cannot fault the app, because the swan is in the shot too. Only you cannot cancel a scan, so you wait for it to load.

A shame, though you do get an animal out of it. And it says something about how I am with this: so focused on that one creature that I do not notice what is happening behind me.

The stork with glasses

My father-in-law needed a profile picture, so he took a selfie. There was a stork’s nest in the background, or one flew over just then. The app recognised him as a stork.

His profile picture has been a stork with glasses taking a selfie ever since. Not a tidy image of a stork in a field, but a sort of human in a stork costume.

It only became something when other people joined in

On day one I thought it was nice, but it had not got hold of me yet. That changed when I started talking about it with other people. If I would do one thing differently, it is this: get someone else involved straight away.

My boyfriend scans too now, so we search together. My mother and I have combed through whole thickets, only because she wanted a good scan of a grasshopper. And we have a group chat, my mother and my mother-in-law and me, where we share what we come across.

With children along it really comes alive. I went to the zoo with a friend’s little daughter. A child like that goes looking, and not only at what is in front of her. She spotted a mouse running through the elephant enclosure. Without her I would only have looked at the elephants.

I also bought one of those pots with a magnifying glass in the lid, so insects are a bit easier to scan.

Who dobudex is for

You have to have something with animals, I think. And you have to like walking outside. I find it hard to go for a walk without a purpose, so this is what gets me out. I leave the house to scan and end up staying out far longer than I meant to.

For children I would say from about four, once they can hold a phone. An insect is still hard at that age, but scanning a dog works fine.

What I would still want

The cards are the nicest part to me, a bit like the Pokémon cards of years ago. I would like to see those back in the app, so I can leaf through them.

I would also like to look inside friends’ Dexes. Right now we have to share everything by hand. When I am at my mother’s I see hers anyway, but at a distance would be just as nice.

If I had to stop tomorrow

The looking would stay. I am so trained by now that I would see those insects and that one unusual bird anyway.

What I would miss is the recording of it. An ordinary photo disappears among all the other photos on my phone.

And I would miss my collection. There is pride in that. It is the same feeling as years ago, when you were playing a game and it crashed: all your progress gone at once.