Using facial recognition technology on birds is not a cuckoo idea after all

Can you use AI to recognise these birds individually?

As a birder, I had heard that if you paid careful attention to the head feathers on the downy woodpeckers that visited your bird feeders, you could begin to recognise individual birds. This intrigued me. I even went so far as to try sketching birds at my own feeders and had found this to be true, up to a point.

In the meantime, in my day job as a computer scientist, I knew that other researchers had used machine learning techniques to recognise individual faces in digital images with a high degree of accuracy.