The African Openbill is a dark stork with a greenish gloss. Its bill has a gap between the upper and lower parts, which helps it feed on shelled mollusks.
It has a dark, greenish-glossed body, a long neck and legs, and a distinctive gap between the two halves of its bill.
A waterbird colony formed at Kanana in Botswana’s Okavango Delta after flooding in 2018. Researchers photographed about 39,500 square metres with a drone and tested semi-automated ways to count several tree-nesting species from the images. African Openbills were among the birds counted.
The Openbill’s dark plumage blended with dark water and background, so some birds were first mistaken for background. After the team corrected those cases, its count for this species was 99% accurate. For all species at Kanana, the corrected total was within 2% of the manual count.
A second colony at Eulimbah in Australia had other waterbirds nesting in reeds and shrubs. Compared with Kanana, the vegetation and background were different, showing why image-counting methods may need to suit each site.
An extinction-risk assessment has not been added yet.
At Kanana, reviewing classification probabilities corrected the confusion between African Openbills and dark background, bringing this species’ detection accuracy to 99%. The corrected count of all species together was within 2% of the manual count.