Nearly caught up

I've nearly caught up. The Brazil trip was in the summer, I think I arrived back on 5th July. The report itself wasn't started until late September, and even with the helping hand of AI which I used to save me typing out bird and palce names and put a togther summary paragraphs of eBird checklists in chronological order it has still taken me nearly a month to get it done. Of course I've had other things to do as well, an office job for instance, so it isn't as if I have been chained to my laptop, but still. Far longer than I would have thought.

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I mentioned AI but in fact the process is much the same as it always was. Blogger on the right hand side of the screen, eBird on the left. Except this time I had a starting point. I downloaded my full eBird history as a csv file and then extracted the records pertaining to the Brazil dates. This results in one row per species; a checklist with 50 species will result in 50 rows. There were 56 checklists over the week and the resulting file had 1047 rows. Where each row sits is governed by a unique checklist ID, and one of the colums has a location, another a date, and another a time stamp. There is a load of other stuff but you can delete it all to make the file size much smaller. Then it is simply a question of prompting AI software, in my case CoPilot and whichever LLM sits behind that, to take this list and generate a series of paragraphs saying where I saw what. I told it to do it in time stamp order, separate out the days, put all bird species names in bold, if counts were notable to add these, and then rather than simply generate a list to put some basic text in to allow it to flow. So it adds things like "in the tall trees", or "in the Varzea scrub" and so on, or "Early in the morning we arrived at such and such a site". Some of this I retained, a huge amount of it I deleted. It created a fictional pond because a checklist contained ducks for instance, so that had to go, and largely my memory filled in exactly where a bird was, if it was in a tree, if it was in a bush and so on. The thing I found hardest to deal with is that it did not know what order birds were seen in and some of the checklists were five hours long. This meant there was a lot of reordering of the paragaraphs to do. What I eventually ended up doing was typing as I normally would but just above the AI text in question. I could then lift bird names or sequences of bird names from the AI-generated paragraphs to drop into my own narrative. Then I would delete these from the lower text and see what was left. I am convinced this saved me ages. All the while the real eBird checklist was on the other side of the screen so I could check everything was accurate - and this time it was. I had been very specific about telling it to only use the csv file and nothing else having caught it adding random birds during my first attempts at doing this a number of months ago. 

The piece de restistance was the trip list on the final post. I used my last Brazil 2025 one as the template, gave it the trimmed list of species - this time all I needed was the name and the date - and said "copy that". It worked out how I had grouped bird families and which taxonomy I had used, and then did exactly the same with a nice even split between the two columns. It decided to go a little off-piste with its own formatting, but with a little bit of reprompting I was able to get it back to how the original looked. What you learn when doing this is how iterative a process it can be but I've saved the various steps and next time I expect it to get to the end point in one hit. After I had the basic structure of the list a further prompt asked it to assign checkmarks to show which species had been seen on which day. This used to take me forever; CoPilot did it in 30 seconds for all 367 species across 9 days. Humanity's entire future may be in doubt but boy can this thing make a list.

Once I had the text then the blog side of my screen was replaced with the gallery of downloaded photos from the day. I would select the ones that I wanted, process them in Photoshop, add the watermark and then upload them to Google. I'd do the same with any photos from my phone, forest-scapes, people, the rivers and so, and then size them to either 1000px or 850px and upload them too. Then back to blogger to insert them between paragraphs, a final read through to check for missing words, stupdi spellnig mistakes and so on, and then publish. I lost count of the number of hours spent, suffice to say it was a lot. But not as many as it might have been. The net result was 13,378 words and 156 images.

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To date, and acknowledging that I have only just finished, this marathon effort has garnered two interactions. Two, and one had nothing whatsoever to do with Brazil - you know who you are! I realise this is very much par for the course when it comes to my foreign adventures but the comment that did in fact relate to Brazil made me laugh out loud - it was to point out a mistake I'd made labelling a photo. It is lucky I have a sense of humour. I appreciate it of course, it meant I was able to correct it. But honestly.

Nevermind. It was still worth it to relive the experience and, in future years, something to look back on. I was also able to embellish my eBird checklists with some of the photos I took. Unfortunately all three of us seem to have taken the exact same photos of the exact same species. Bob or Richard would notice me lift my camera and do the same, or vice versa, if any bird actually came close enough. So if you go to the website you will see lists of 50 species with 48 of them unillustrated. But those lucky two will have multiple images from all three of us! 

So I'm done. Finished! There is nothing quite like the relief of pressing publish on that final post, which in my case is always the aforementioned trip list, ideally accompanied by a photo of a small panther in habitat if I remembered to take one. If I remembered, as if.... I have one more short trip to write up, a long weekend on the Scilly Islands for the birders pelagics, but the weather was so calm and sunny that there is virtually nothing to write about so this will be very quick!