Specialized recreators, such as rock climbers, contribute citizen science observations of rare wildlife species from largely inaccessible landscapes. Still, motivations to contribute opportunistic records to citizen science for species conservation remain underexplored. Utilizing a mixed-methods design, we employed semi-structured interviews (n = 28), member-checking workshops (n = 11), and Q-methodology (n = 11) to trace motivational pathways to the benefits rock climbers anticipate when report