Teaser and Tip

How was your Thanksgiving?  If it was as busy, and fun, as mine you’ll understand why this email is later than usual.  We had a traditional Thanksgiving dinner (turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing) Thursday night for four of us.  On Friday we had 17 relatives over for ham, sweet potatoes, and all the fixings.  So much going on I couldn’t find 10 minutes to sit at the computer to compose a GreatBirdPics message until this morning.

Today I will share a teaser of my next post about our South Africa bird tour.  We saw the bird below while roaming around the Cape of Good Hope National Park.

I’m not going to tell you what type of bird this is because I want you to try Google Lens to ID the bird.  I have been using the Merlin app to identify bird species from photos and it’s pretty good.  Lately I’ve been using Google Lens because it is faster (because you don’t have to enter the date and location of the photo) and more accurate.  It’s not that Merlin doesn’t identify the bird in the image, but it often isn’t sure which species so it will provide you with several possible species to choose from.  So far, Google Lens has identified the correct species 99% of the time (it does show alternatives in case it isn’t right).

The easiest way to try out Google Lens is to open up this email on your desktop or laptop computer.  Then open the Google app on your phone – you should see something like this on your phone:

You’ll notice two icons to the right of the word “Search”.  Click on the one that looks like a camera and you’re in Google Lens.  Point your phone’s camera at the image of the bird able, then click the Magnifying Glass icon in the white circle.  After thinking a moment your phone will identify the bird (hint: it’s a type of Sunbird).  I’ve been using Google Lens a lot on my South African bird pictures when I’m not sure of the species and it has worked great.

Google Lens is fun to play with as you can point it at anything and it will identify it.  I recently broke an antique salt shaker so I used Google Lens to identify it so I could purchase a replacement through eBay.

That’s it for today.  Thanks again for all who share their Great Bird Pics and make comments on those pics.

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