Avian Ecologist

What Does it Mean to be a Birder?

What is a birder, anyway? Several birders have made stabs at what it is to be defined as a birder, in part spurred by questions of how to count how many of us are out there. First, the Birdwatcher’s Companion (2004) seek’s to differentiate “birding” from “bird-watching,” as terminology has notably changed over the past 20 […]

July Blooms

round-leaved orchid slender lady’s-tresses club-spur orchid (bog) spotted coralroot (Ridges) cross-leaved milkwort field milkwort whorled milkwort winged loosestrife false-loosestrife rough-seeded clammy-weed common dodder false pimpernel large-flowered yellow false foxglove eastern figwort Canada horse-balm marsh hedge-nettle American water-horehound northern water-horehound flat-leaved bladderwort brook lobelia Jimsonweed Apple-of-Peru Virginia ground-cherry round-headed bush-clover prairie bush-clover Illinois tick-trefoil partridge pea […]

How I’ve Been Processing Climate Data

From a THREDDS server, I’m using the NetcdfSubset portal to obtain a spatial subset of my climate data set of interest. Since the files I need are too big to download from their HTTP server, they instead give me an OPeNDAP URI with the spatial subset info. I then pass that to nccopy from the […]

And Now for a Windows Hack in a Pinch…

For reasons I won’t describe here, I had to quickly install nco on Windows, and figure out how to use the command line to loop over files in a given directory. So, I navigated to the folder where I have nco on the command line, and ran this to loop over the files in my […]

Spatially Manipulating NetCDF Files

I ended up getting a bunch of climate NetCDF files from a colleague for each combination of climate model, climate change scenario and variable. So, what I have is a list of 3-D files consisting of observations/predictions of a given weather variable over latitude, longitude and time (you can picture them as cubes, if you […]

Hummingbird Feeder Up on the Deck

I put my hummingbird feeder back up today, which I suspect is the only feeder my neighbor below me won’t complain about. (Even so, it’s well-hidden from the outside by the pole in front of it.) My neighbors to the west of me have 2 and have a resident pair of hummingbirds. I’m hoping they’ll […]

MN Ornithologists’ Union Young Birders’ Committee

I’m pleased to have been asked to serve on the MOU Young Birders’ Committee! We’re generously defining “young” as 18-40, but not without precedent (Erikson 1963). Our overarching goal is to improve participation of those of us in this age group in conservation-related organizations, which in our specific case is MOU. Conveniently, my friend who […]

Getting Started: Learning How to Observe Birds

Meta-learning As with any skill, there’s a certain element to “learning how to learn” to observe birds. You’ll see what I mean if you invest time in this new hobby. You start to learn what marks to look for and where to look, or how to listen. You pick up how to watch and anticipate […]

My Annoying Climate Download Process

Here’s a summary of my week: I needed mass amounts of data from the NetcdfSubset portal, but it was too much for the HTTP server to handle (they set a cap) with just selecting the products and spatial extent to download. So, instead they returned to me a URI that needed to be passed through […]

Spatial Information Already in BBS Data

You can get some good information from the BBS site on routes, etc. but you may need to convert it to a more friendly format (i.e. a CSV file). Once you have your dataframes linked up, you can spatially subset based on some of the data that has already been assigned per BBS route… BBS […]