Practice Doesn’t Make Perfect

But it does make better

Australian Pelican. Very obviously not a White-bellied Sea-eagle. Photo by pen_ash on Unsplash

I once mistook a pelican for a sea-eagle. In my defence, the bird was flying away from me, so I made the identification based on a large, white, feathery belly. It was only when the ‘eagle’ made a gliding turn that I noticed the huge bill and the black markings on the wings. It was not my finest birding hour. Even beginning birders should be able to tell the difference between an Australian pelican and a White-bellied Sea-eagle.

My bird identification skills are better now. Oh, they’re not perfect. I am still frequently stumped by female and juvenile Golden Whistlers. As far as I’m concerned, Lewin’s, Yellow-spotted and Cryptic Honeyeaters are identical. And if you asked me about the field marks of a Jacky Winter, I’d yell ‘look over there’ and run away.

But I’ve had practice now. That’s what it takes to get better.

People bang on about LLMs making us all experts. The world’s knowledge at our fingertips etcetera… Well, no matter how long you spend refining your prompts for the plagiarism machine, it still requires practice to become better at something. (Other than prompt-refining.)

During the lockdown, I wrote about backyard birdwatching. This was a time when we were all searching for things to do and ways to connect with nature within the limitations…