Avian Ecologist

Lab Notebook Entry: Script Benchmark

model 1 forest guild took ~3.73 days, 17G RAM, all 4 CPU cores

Climate-Induced Phenotypic Mismatch

Will this lingering, late snow make it easier to spot mammals that dramatically molt between seasons? I’ve been seeing posts on the local naturalist groups of molting snowshoe hares and ermine, who are adopting their summer color perhaps too fast for this (very) late spring! For instance, check out this photo posted today to the […]

Extreme Unseasonable Spring Weather

Yesterday, I tuned into an ultra-conservative Eau Claire radio station with a local host denying climate change. She had on a meteorologist who also didn’t believe in climate change, so I don’t know if this piece was to some degree reactionary or just a coincidence. Anyway, while I’m tempted to rant for myself against this […]

Debugging my Script to Run on HPC

I have access to a supercomputer (and maybe more upcoming) and I’d like to try out making my workflow parallel. Back when I used HTCondor, I broke down my script to hypothetically do it, but ran into some snafus and didn’t quite end up implementing it on their system. Anyway, I’m ready to try again […]

Travel Delayed by…a Snowstorm?!

Is this really spring…?! Today I was supposed to complete my drive back up north, and am delayed by a snowstorm hitting the entirety of Wisconsin! Could it be climate change? When weather records are broken, you always have to wonder. As a researcher, I’m excited to see what comes next from this groundbreaking study. Roads […]

My Top 10 Favorite Things About Being a Birder

I’ve always had a natural curiosity about birds for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t really get hooked into birding until I learned more about it in undergrad. When I took ornithology lab, I learned how to learn bird song, and I learned more about my local birds (including seasonality of occurrence). […]

#NameThatBirdSong Updated List

I run a science communication (#scicomm) game on Twitter every Weds using the hashtag in the post title. At noon central time I post a challenge bird of the week! 🙂 This week’s bird is the red-winged blackbird! Meanwhile here’s a compilation of the last few months’ birds… red-tailed hawk western meadowlawk eastern whip-poor-will mourning […]

Note to Self… (Lab Notebook Entry)

Network script as currently written runs single core but with lots of memory needs…

April Wildflowers of the Upper Midwest

These are some of the earliest bloomers in Wisconsin (by no means an exhaustive list). golden corydalis Pennsylvania bittercress Carolina whitlow-grass field pennycress little-pod false flax hillside blueberry blue bugle low calamint phlox downy sand violet wood-sorrel hoary puccoon violet great-spurred violet lance-leaved foamflower nodding chickweed crane’s-bill buttercup prairie creeping Carolina anemone dandelion prairie false […]

Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) Migration

Today, we drove most of the way back home, traversing the PPR on our way from Chamberlain, SD to Minneapolis. It’s peak waterfowl migration here, with ponds just thawed in the Dakotas. We took some back roads to check out the potholes filled with ducks. Along the way, we saw Krider’s red-tailed hawks and a […]