Not a Bird
Rachel Hendery
Since moving to Australia, I have been captivated by the colourful bird life. I mostly take photos of parrots, but also other birds, almost daily. When I saw the call for contributions to the Urban Field Naturalist, it was obvious to me that I would submit a bird photo or two. But which? I opened the Google Photos app, which cleverly uses Artificial Intelligence algorithms to classify your photos for you on the fly when you do a search. I typed in "bird".
Of the "photos of birds" that Google Photos returned, the image above and the two below are some of my favourites.
Perhaps Google is just 150 million years out of date?
On the positive side, these pictures reminded me of the richness of the non-bird wildlife in my backyard as well, and inspired me to go out and capture more photos of the lizards I share my garden with.
Author Bio: Rachel is originally from Aotearoa (New Zealand) and has spent the last 15 years marvelling at the diversity of the Australian wildlife and wrestling with the stupidity of technology (often self-inflicted).