Tonight, we went to McGregor Marsh, the best spot in the state to find yellow rails. I’ve been many a time before, eventually deciding last summer that someone must be playing a colossal practical joke on me and that those birds weren’t actually there. 😉 Yellow rail are hard to find; in fact, I’d say […]

I’m thrilled to say we finally saw another great horned owl in my atlas block tonight, about a year since my only other sighting! We staked it out as it was hunting, and we lost it when it flew almost parallel the road toward 11th street. We drove down 11th street hoping to relocate it, […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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). […]

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 […]

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