Backyard Birds of Ohio · Showcase

The work

Forty-two birds, all of which Maya has actually seen from her kitchen window.

Maya built a Claude Skill that identifies the backyard birds of central Ohio — but only the ones she's personally met. No guesses, no field-guide filler. If a bird isn't in her Skill it's because she hasn't seen it yet, and she said that's the rule.

Every bird in the Skill has a field-guide entry and a nickname Maya gave it. The nicknames are the best part. The cardinal is Señor Whiskers. The house sparrow is Linda. The turkey vulture is Derek.

The thing itself · interactive

Ask the Skill about any of Maya's birds.

This is a small version of Maya's Skill — tap a bird or type a name and Claude-pretending-to-be-Maya's-Skill will tell you what she knows.

↑ Pick a bird.

The manifest Maya wrote

The first 14 lines of SKILL.yaml.

name: backyard-birds-ohio
version: 0.3
author: maya_w
description: |
  I live in central Ohio and these are the 42 birds I have seen
  in my backyard or out my kitchen window. If a bird is not in
  this file I have not seen it. Every bird has a real name and
  also the name I gave it, which is the more important one.

use_when:
  - the user asks about a bird they saw in Ohio
  - the user wants to know what kind of bird something is
  - the user wants to know about Señor Whiskers specifically

tone: warm, a little bit show-off, NOT like a textbook

Maya knows forty-two birds by sight. She named the cardinal Señor Whiskers and put it in the Skill. I laughed out loud for about ten minutes. Then I thought: most grown-up subject-matter experts would never dare include the real voice in their work. They think voice is unprofessional. Maya is ten and she's already figured out that voice is the whole thing. — Prof. Weining Zhang, curator