Simon Willison’s Weblog

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6 posts tagged “wildlife”

2026

/elsewhere/sightings/. I have a new camera (a Canon R6 Mark II) so I'm taking a lot more photos of birds. I share my best wildlife photos on iNaturalist, and based on yesterday's successful prototype I decided to add those to my blog.

Screenshot of a "Sightings" webpage with a search bar and RSS icon, showing "Filters: Sorted by date" and "208 results page 1 / 7 next » last »»". First entry: SIGHTING 7:51 PM — Acorn Woodpecker, with two photos labeled "Acorn Woodpecker" of black and white woodpeckers with red caps on tree branches, dated 2nd May 2026. Second entry: SIGHTING 10:08 AM – 11:17 AM — Acorn Woodpecker, Western Fence Lizard, Osprey, with three photos labeled "Acorn Woodpecker" (bird on bare branches against blue sky), "Wester..." (lizard on tree bark), and "Osprey" (nest on a utility pole), dated 1st May 2026. Third entry: SIGHTING 11:11 AM — White-crowned Sparrow, with a photo labeled "White-crowned Sparrow" of a sparrow with black and white striped head singing with open beak, dated 30th Apr 2026.

I built this feature on my phone using Claude Code for web, as an extension of my beats system for syndicating external content. Here's the PR and prompt.

As with my other forms of incoming syndicated content sightings show up on the homepage, the date archive pages, and in site search results.

I back-populated over a decade of iNaturalist sightings, which means you that if you search for lemur you'll see my lemur photos from Madagascar in 2019!

# 2nd May 2026, 5:26 pm / blogging, photography, wildlife, ai, inaturalist, generative-ai, llms, ai-assisted-programming, claude-code

2024

Teresa T is the name of the whale in Pillar Point Harbor near Half Moon Bay

Visit Teresa T is the name of the whale in Pillar Point Harbor near Half Moon Bay

There is a young humpback whale in the harbor at Pillar Point, just north of Half Moon Bay, California right now. Their name is Teresa T and they were first spotted on Thursday afternoon.

[... 254 words]

1:04 am / 8th September 2024 / photography, wildlife, half-moon-bay

2020

Happy Birthday Sea Lions! (via) Today, June 15th, is Sea Lion birthday—half of all California Sea Lions are born today thanks to clever co-ordinated delayed implantation by Sea Lion females. Natalie has started making nature videos and I’ve been tagging along as her camera-person—this three minute video, shot at Pier 39 in San Francisco, celebrates Sea Lion birthday and explains how it works.

# 15th June 2020, 7:08 pm / natalie-downe, wildlife, youtube

2010

Owls, Otters, Monkeys and Lions Near You.com. It’s not just Owls—we also registered ottersnearyou.com, monkeysnearyou.com and lionsnearyou.com. We’ll probably stop there though, or this could turn in to a very expensive marketing gimmick.

# 19th January 2010, 2:54 pm / lions, monkeys, otters, owls, projects, wildlife, wildlifenearyou

owlsnearyou.com. Nat and I built this over the weekend. It asks for your location, then tells you where your nearest Owl is (using sightings data people have entered on WildlifeNearYou.com). If you’re using Firefox 3.6 or an iPhone it grabs your location using the W3C geolocation API so you don’t have to type anything at all.

# 19th January 2010, 2:45 pm / geolocation, iphone, owls, owlsnearyou, projects, wildlife, wildlifenearyou

2008

A Leopard attacking and killing a Crocodile. Amazing sequence of photos by Hal Brindley.

# 20th July 2008, 6:48 pm / crocodile, halbrindley, leopard, photography, wildlife

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