Training FieldNet 1: A 5,077-Species Wildlife Classifier That Fits in 39 MB

RealDex shipped with BioCLIP, a scientific vision transformer bolted onto a phone. Then I replaced it. FieldNet 1 is a MobileNetV4 classifier I trained on 5,077 animal species — it raised top-1 accuracy from 46.8% to 61.3%, cut the first-run download by more than half, and survived INT8 quantization almost untouched. This is the story of the failed run, the rigged benchmark, and the USB drive that nearly cost three days.