Avian Ecologist

Thunder Basin National Grassland

Today we visited the Keyton 1 greater sage-grouse lek and were treated to a high count of 25 males and 17 females! With the main aim of our trip achieved, we backtracked through Badlands NP to make the most of our entry fee. 🙂 We saw courting prairie falcons flying around over a ridge in the […]

Driving through South Dakota!

After waiting out winter storm Uma yesterday, today we officially head west! Here’s a study area description of SD copied from a neat paper. “The study area was the state of South Dakota, as well as portions of the Black Hills extending into Crook County, Wyoming (Fig. 1). South Dakota was glaciated east of the […]

Idea for Running My Models on HPC

So I think I’m going to try running models parallel within the script. I’ll restrict runs to a single core, because the new HPC system should have plenty of memory to accommodate each run. I want to use “future” because it seems to be quickly becoming all the rage!

Making a Parallel Workflow for HPC

I’ve learned about some options I didn’t know that allow for running lines parallel right within the R script. In that article, the author refers to how I was conceiving the workflow as “poor man’s parallel.” 🙂 So, I might combine the newer technique by running the models parallel within the script, and creating an […]

End of Peak Barred Owl “Hooting Season”

While there’s a chance to hear them anytime of the year here, the “best window” to pin down their territory wraps up about now. “In Minnesota, calling occurs in all months of the year, but most frequent in Feb and early Mar, prior to egg-laying (Dunstan and Sample 1972). Another peak in late summer and […]

Great Horned Owl “Hooting Season” Over

While I still hold out some hope, we’re largely past the key window for detecting great horned owls vocalizing. “In Wisconsin, territorial hooting ends in mid-Feb, in keeping with timing of first eggs laid…” – Birds of North America Across the state, birds are probably on eggs by now and thus less conspicuous. Since this […]

Fastest Fitting for Bayesian Models?

Right now, I’m focused on computational efficiency (and thereby speed) of fitting Bayesian models. For my dissertation I used R-INLA, so in this “lab notebook” of a blog I need to jot down my thoughts around some current methodological hangups. Right now, even though it seems to be the fastest thing available, it’s honestly still […]

Valentine’s Evening Luck: Barred Owl!

I was so thrilled to have my 2nd identifiable sighting of an owl that might breed here last night: I saw my 1st ever barred owl in my atlas block! Unfortunately, it was just hunting, so I didn’t have any breeding activity clues. It caught my eye when it flew up to a telephone line, […]

Linux: Fixing Broken Dependencies

Before I forget: sudo apt-get -f install

#NameThatBirdSong (Twitter Sci-Comm Game)

Today’s bird of the day is: ring-billed gull! Birds I’ve covered for my twitter game so far are… American black duck mallard herring gull common raven Canada goose common redpoll painted bunting pileated woodpecker wild turkey bald eagle American robin American crow black-capped chickadee