Bird vs. Fish

Best Birds of 2025

Here were my best birds of the year! I haven’t yet fleshed out the stories here; check back later.

Creating A Vector Layer By Hand

I had been given some PDF maps with outlines to digitize, but with enough land features in the map to be able to geo-reference them. I screen-grabbed the maps from the PDFs and saved the screenshots as TIFF. Then, opened QGIS, added the Open Street Maps base layer and zoomed into my area of interest. […]

Weekend Fishing

Cut & Retie podcast episode this week: https://sites.libsyn.com/441516/ep-164-the-unsinkable-speckled-urine-bag “We get the gray trout/weakfish (whatever) rarely do you get any size. Normally they’re in a massive school on top of, you know, a wreck or a rock pile or something, kind of early fall/late summer, and rarely do they get > 10 in. Last year I […]

12 hr Pelagic

I was thrilled to get out on the water on the nicest November trip (weather-wise) I have enjoyed yet! Land temps ranged from the 40s into the 50s during the day. The day served as possibly the only Nov trip I have not been cold, once the sun was sufficiently high in the sky. This […]

Fishing

“I actually caught not a lot, 2 weakfish this year myself in the New England surf, which is more than I catch in 5 years combined unfortunately most years, but there’s been a lot of weakfish in southern New England late summer. How has the New Jersey weakfish bite been this year?” – Toby Lapinski […]

Cynoscion

It has been an honor to come onboard for the technical/stock assessment subcommittee for weakfish (Cynoscion regalis) which is currently managed by NJ at the genus level, but may be separated out to species giving spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus) its own independent regulation. I’m also serving as the NJ representative for the latter, though we […]

Acadia National Park

Happy Labor Day Weekend! We did a trip to Maine to celebrate my mom’s birthday. Today we crossed a NP off the bucket list! We drove the park loop most of the way, but turned off at Bar Harbor, so I’d still like to “close the loop” from there and drive back from Bar Harbor […]

Landscaping: The Tree Edition

This year, I finally figured out how to get plants from the tree farm I’d kept meaning to visit: I was delighted to find they went to native plant fairs, and one was in my birth city! So I went home for the weekend and was able to get the species I’d been planning for […]

New Site Title

I have updated the site title to match the new domain, and the new themes to be explored here 🙂

Flower Walk

Again, it’s summer, so allow me to share some re-wilding (well, sorta…) that I’ve been up to in my yard. I do enjoy varietals, so excuse the not strict wild-typing here. Otherwise, I have several natives to at least the state level, if not county. (Probably my next project is going to be separating that […]