Colm O'Regan: How I use apps like Google lens to get closer to nature
Colm O'Regan is now the sort of man who can say “oh that’s speedwell” with confidence
I must look that up in my book, Dada would say. ‘That’ was a plant he came across. The book was by Dr D.G. Hessayon.
He loved to know the names of things and recently so do I. It’s been a journey. Step 1 was the ceasefire with the dandelions. I say ceasefire but the dandelions always won. I’d be pulling on them and the dandelion would say, “Ok, ok, I’m giving up. You win.” And you’d say “Really?” and the Dandelion would say, “HAHAH NO! I left a root down there for two weeks time”. But my whole outlook on weeds changed. I realised they’re essential.
But apart from knowing dandelions were good for early bees, I didn’t really know the names of any of the plants I no longer disliked.
In the meantime, Search The Internet With A Picture technology improved dramatically and I heard of an app. ‘Picture This’. It cost a few bob but it was a cheap present as it turned out. It has changed EVERYTHING. If you walk with me now it might be frustrating as I stop and take a photo of the plant, the app makes a whirring shape and tells me that yes it’s a dock leaf.
But over time my repertoire has expanded a bit to camas, cleavers, mercury, yarrow, scabious - which sounds like you’d see it on a sleeveless T-shirt of a metaller - hemlock, wood anemone, cuckoo flowers, buttebur, vetch. Just great names that would previously have been surnames in Lord of the Rings.
Usually, it takes about four goes for the name to stick. But now I am THAT GUY who can say “oh that’s speedwell” with confidence. Maybe you’ll avoid me.
Occasionally the app will throw up an ominous one. Invasives. Japanese knotweed, rhododendron, Himalayan balsam – they’re like getting the second line on the antigen now.
Google Lens also works. I use that for insects, especially butterflies. If the hoors’ll stay still. Butterflies are a good sign a habitat is still ok. Previously they were the orangey ‘one stuck in the net curtains’. But now they’re a small tortoise-shell. I found a Peacock butterfly and a Speckled Wood and I was delighted with myself. I’m not camped out in the Gobi watching rare leopards go at it but my bit of nature is just as valid.
And most recently another breakthrough. birdsong. I know there are other ways to identify them. Maybe a slim leatherbound volume written by retired Major Cromwell Fitzchurchill On Observations Taken Between Pheasant Shoots In Homelandshire and Its Environs. But my lazy 21st-century brain still needed an app to get me going. I downloaded Birdnet free “from the K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics at the Cornell Lab and Chemnitz University of Technology”. You hold it up to the …er… planet and it records the birdsong it hears and tells you what they are. The first time there were too many people around who wouldn’t shut their holes so the app analysed it correctly as Homo Sapiens but the next few were bang on.
A house sparrow somewhere outside the eaves, Passer Domesticus to its friends. A goldfinch on the way to school – Carduelis Carduelis, So good they named it twice. For the first time, I heard a robin before I saw one.
We need to value the humdrum nature around us. It’s not a Royal Rumble between a crocodile, a gnu and a lion in the Serengeti. It’s only a liverwort. But it’s just as important. It has a place. Everything is nature. And when we know its name it’ll be more real to us and we’ll be less likely to make pure shite of it.
And when I know a bit more, in honour of Dada, then I’ll go buy the book.
