Carl T. Bergstrom

Not as intensively, but yes. The banded birds in this thread are species that number at most in the few thousands, largely transported to offshore predator-free islands where they have a better chance of surviving.

I like that approach.

Tui be continued...

Grey bird hanging from a fern leaf

And here's a whitehead again, hanging from a tree fern frond. This guy was so entertaining that I almost missed the one and only boat back to the mainland.

Yes. As always, I'm posting standard Clements checklist names. There's a strong argument for updating that list for pretty much all of the Aotearoa endemics, but that's a separate issue.

Oh my goodness. Great light!

Black-headed honeyeater with yellow plumage

Another super-rarity, the hihi or stitchbird. These birds struggle to survive without substantial support in the form of food supplementation and nest boxes, probably because of habitat differences between the forests they once inhabited and the predator-free offshore islands where they now hang on.

Kōkako, a large grey songbird with blue wattles, on Tiritiri

When I headed to Aotearoa, I thought my top target passerine was the South Island saddleback. But I'd badly underestimated the North Island kōkako.

I've never heard such an extraordinary song. And they're so large and marvelous. Sadly I never got a great photo, but what a bird!

Damn and out in the open too. I never got clear lines and good light on one the whole time I was there.

As best as I know, Scandinavian bird photographers leaned into that before the rest of us. I love that look and have been trying to replicate it with limited success but I'm glad the basic effect comes through.

I don't think I got an adequate shot of one. Saw them on Ulva but that was about it...

Yes. Anything I post without explicit attribution is my own.

My thought as well!

Small passerine on a fern tree leaf with, you guessed it, a white head.

And this, of course, is the whitehead.

Don't look at me like that.

I'm not the one who named them.

Another extremely rare New Zealand passerine, the yellowhead.

Black bird with red wattles and a brown "saddle" in the forest.

Returning to the South Island again, here's a South Island adult.

Same bird, shots taken 0.1 second apart.

Black bird with large red wattles and a brown back

Here is its North Island counterpart, the North Island saddleback. This one is an adult, photographed on Kapiti.

Brown bird with small red wattles tossing a berry down the hatch

Here's one of the rarer passerines on the planet, the South Island saddleback, photographed feeding on the island of Ulva in Rakiura National Park. This is a juvenile or "jackbird".

Your comment hits home. I realized in Aotearoa New Zealand that I'm fucking furious about so many things — but the continual expression of anger to a likeminded few is probably not what we need right now so much as a reminder of everything worth fighting for.

New Zealand bellbird shaking off the water

Sugaree 🪶

OED accepts either; I went with the latinate.

I'm in here doing my best Lora!

Yellow bird with black face and red eye, all puffed out and slightly damp.

Let me start a belated thread of Aotearoa New Zealand silvan birds.

To lead things off, a New Zealand Bellbird photographed on Kapiti Island.

I'm delighted that you found the course materials interesting! Thank you for posting.

It’s very hard to pick a single passage to give you a sense of just how fucked up this is.

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at hig...

Delete your socks, people.

"We show that large language models can be used to perform
at-scale deanonymization...at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator."

Large-scale online deanonymization with LLMs We show that large language models can be used to perform at-scale deanonymization. With full Internet access, our agent can re-identify Hacker News users and Anthropic Interviewer participants at hig...

Delete your socks, people.

"We show that large language models can be used to perform
at-scale deanonymization...at high precision, given pseudonymous online profiles and conversations alone, matching what would take hours for a dedicated human investigator."

The two older trump boys

I fear these two take things to a whole new level.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s Son Emerges as Leading Choice to Be His Successor If Mojtaba Khamenei is chosen by Iran’s senior clerics, it may signal a victory for hard-liners, an analyst said.

Now I realize this sounds pretty bad, but could it be a lot worse.

It could happen in the US.