When I first took up birdwatching in the mid 1990s (knowingly and intentionally, that is; I’d been watching them casually long before that) one of the first books I read on the subject in an effort to learn how to do it was Pete Dunne’s “The Feather Quest.”
As one who has dedicated decades of his life to helping people learn about, understand, and as a result it is hoped care more about the natural world and the present state it is in, I am particularly troubled by AI-generated images of birds and other wildlife as they present the unreal as real, encouraging many of those seeing them and not understanding that they are nothing more than the random collection of data assembled into visual images by an AI image-generating computer program to develop a distorted expectation of how the natural world truly appears.
Beginning in 2024, after some years of putting it on the metaphorical back burner, I made the decision to devote more time and effort to birdwatching. I was once an avid birder, meticulously listing every twitch of a feather that can into view, then, having become disillusioned by some of the things I experienced in […]
When the news reached me that Ray Reedman had written another book on the subject of the history of bird names, also, like his previous “Lapwings, Loons and Lousy Jacks; The How and Why of Bird Names,” published by Pelagic Publishing, my pocket notebook was immediately deployed and a note duly made (as the motto of the journal Notes & Queries instructs us: “When found, make a note of”).