Nina's Blog - Saturday 21st February 2026

Saturday 21st February 2026, 16:19

Went for a walk today. The weather forecast was for a dramatic change of temperature and it was right. A couple of days ago it was -10 C in the middle of the day, when I went out at about 11:00 this morning it was already +2 C.

Walked 5 100 steps. I think it's time I made going for a walk a habit rather than one of the must do items. It wasn't quite such a struggle today.

Stopped at the supermarket to buy ingredients for tomorrow's dinner and at the 'pol for a bottle of Amaretto because I'm going to make a streusel.

Finally got around to making the blackberry jam that I couldn't make because I didn't have any lemon juice. I've put it in a jam jar and it's now cooling in the kitchen. I made it in the bread maker on the jam setting. It will be interesting to see how it comes out.

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ninalanyon · 61-69, T

Saturday 21st February 2026, 16:55:

I cropped the bird picture and uploaded it to Bird Finder at https://birdfinder.app. It says:

Identified Bird Species

Great Tit
95%
Detailed Characteristics

Medium-sized passerine bird with a distinct black cap, prominent white cheek patches, bright yellow underparts, and gray-blue wings with black edging. It has a short, conical beak adapted for eating seeds and insects, a compact body approximately 14 cm in length, and short legs. Distinctive markings include bold black facial markings forming a mask around the eyes.

Sounds reasonable and accords with what i expected

I also tried Image Identifier at https://imageidentifier.ai/what-bird-species-is-this. But that site tries to be too clever and doesn't work in Firefox

Then I tried Nyckel at https://www.nyckel.com/pretrained-classifiers/bird-identifier/
It was utterly useless. It thinks it's a grandala, not even the right colour but it does say it's only 23% confident

Then I tried the Free Bird Identifier at https://freebirdidentifier.com/. This one is even more broken than Image Identifier and returns this:

Failed to analyze image: [GoogleGenerativeAI Error]: Error fetching from https://generativelanguage.googleapis.com/v1/models/gemini-1.5-flash:generateContent: [404 ] models/gemini-1.5-flash is not found for API version v1, or is not supported for generateContent. Call ListModels to see the list of available models and their supported methods.

But it did get a result, not a good one although it is better than Nyckel. At least it thinks it's bird that actually does live here:

Bird Analysis Results
Bird Identification:
Scientific name:Passer domesticus
Common name:House Sparrow
Family:Passeridae (True Sparrows)
Key Characteristics:
Size:14-16cm in length
Appearance:Males have gray crown, chestnut sides of head, black bib
Distinctive features:Females are plain brown with streaked backs
Wing pattern:Short, broad with distinct wing bars
Bill:Short, thick, perfect for seed eating

Utterly ridiculous though, it's not even close to the right colour. And it doesn't give any indication of how confident it is in the identification.

So if you need a bird identified it seems that the best site is Bird Finder at https://birdfinder.app.