My fun, history-filled guide to city pigeons, A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching, has been out for almost two weeks. Thanks for the photos of pigeons, parrots, chickens, & pups reading it. I'm really grateful for your thoughts and encouragement, y'all!
I have a picture book out today! Flowers Are Pretty...Weird! is a gleeful introduction to plants for the budding botanist. In a starred review, School Library Journal said "Both educational and humorous, this is highly recommended.” Out through Tundra Books, with spectacular art by Jacob Souva. Get it here.
I decided to get back into doing #colour_collective challenges. This week's challenge colors were butter yellow and lilac grey. Here's a male Northern Harrier, also known as a Gray Ghost.
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Neural nest: AI-generated pigeon breeds
I'd been vaguely aware of pigeons until I read my friend Rosemary Mosco's book A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching.
Now I'm in love.
And so in honor of my newfound appreciation of pigeons, I decided to generate some never-before-seen pigeon breeds. And to my unending delight, @birdandmoon agreed to help me!
She collected 42 real pigeon breeds with interesting names, like "Hungarian Giant House Pigeon" and "Archangel" and "Fish-eye Roller". Then I gave the list to a couple of neural networks, giant internet-trained models that are part of gpt-3. They're trained to complete text, so given a list of interesting pigeon breeds, they generally try to come up with new and equally interesting-sounding breeds. Here are some of our favorites, illustrated by Rosemary Mosco herself:
I love them all.
And if you or the pigeon fanciers in your life would like to learn more about real pigeons, I recommend you check out Rosemary's charming and informative book.
You can find other fun science and nature cartoons at Rosemary's website, birdandmoon.com.