The pipeline behind the public life list. A trip’s raw photos go in; what comes out is a short list of sightings for me to check, and a life list that stays current without spreadsheet work.
How a trip becomes sightings
Find. A detector locates each bird in the camera’s embedded preview, crops it, and groups bursts of frames into single encounters.
Identify. BioCLIP 2.5 ranks candidate species for each encounter against the species recorded on iNaturalist for that county, weighted gently by how common each is that time of year. Species that are rare for the place and season are flagged rather than suppressed.
Review. A small web app groups encounters by species. I confirm or correct each group, fix a crop when the detector picked a branch, and choose the best frame. Nothing reaches the list without that review.
Edit. For the keepers, lifer writes a first-pass darktable edit in my usual style; I finish the photos that need local work in darktable.
The published list, in taxonomic order with the first and latest sighting for each species and the photos behind them, is on the birds page.