A GoPro on the bow takes a photograph every sixty seconds, all day. Each evening I pull the frames onto my phone, run them through the app, and it generates a reading for each one. Each reading carries a position, a time, a weather state: GPS tracked throughout the day, wind, pressure and cloud cover logged as it goes, and a sound field for whatever the camera missed.
Divers don't sit on open water at random. Where a bird settles, how long it stays, whether it dives or moves on: all of that is a response to the place, to the water, the weather, what else is out there. A diving bird is a clue, not a confirmation. So the log isn't only recording what the camera sees; it's trying to read the water the way the bird reads it, treating the bird's own presence, or its absence, as a kind of instrument. Absence matters too. It doesn't mean nothing was there.
What I'm not doing is speaking for the bird. The photograph catches one channel; the model has only ever seen photographs of it. The bird is working across sound, smell, water temperature, what other species are doing around it. Jakob von Uexküll called this the Umwelt: each species living inside its own perceptual world. Wittgenstein called it a language game: meaning comes from use, inside a form of life. The bird, the camera, the model and I are reading the same water from different worlds. Neither has the complete picture.
The model makes mistakes. It misidentifies birds at distance, it can't hear the site, it works from a single image. These readings are a starting point, not the record.