Identifying Individual Great Gray Owls (<i>Strix nebulosa</i>) and Snowy Owls (<i>Bubo scandiacus</i>) Using Wing Feather Bar Patterns
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Bar patterns on flight feathers of Great Gray Owls (Strix nebulosa) and Snowy Owls (Bubo scandiacus) are variable, and can be used to recognize individual birds. Here I illustrate a method for taking photos of wings of captured owls and describe a way to arrange images of flying birds for comparison with photos of birds in flight or in the hand. I report four examples. First, two Great Gray Owls photographed in flight on different days at the same site were shown to be the same individual, but differed from a dead owl found at that location a month later. Second, I compared eight photographs of wintering Snowy Owls in flight in Saskatchewan and determined that they portrayed seven different owls. Third, I examined photos of breeding male first-year Great Gray Owls at neighboring nest sites and established that they were different birds. Finally, I compared photos of breeding female Great Gray Owls at the same nest site in 2011 and 2013, and determined that they showed two individuals. I suggest that such photography may be used as a tool to census populations of Great Gray Owls and Snowy Owls.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".