We’re heading to Naples, FL today. Mangrove cuckoo is cryptic this time of year, but the only land species that would be a lifer for me that by all accounts is in range. If I was able to take a boat decently offshore, pomarine jaeger winter off the coast. My “lowest priority” chase would be black rail.

Today, I did my 1st CBC in my new (well, since end of summer) home city. I joined the team that counted section T. It was my most northerly CBC yet! Accordingly, new personal CBC birds for me: pine grosbeaks and ravens! My team was led by a friend, and I met a new birding friend that was […]

Over the weekend, my ecologist boyfriend (mentioned in yesterday’s post) asked about the steam rising from the lake. Since then, I’ve found a few references to it, most intriguingly a video calling it “freezing spray” because it’s been freezing to the boats coming in off the lake. Later, I heard a friend refer to the […]

My guy is the one on the right. 🙂 Another nostalgic post, because today is our 2 year dating anniversary! I took this photo when we went to Scuppernong prairie on a successful search for eared false-foxglove. I’ll spare you the naturalist details of why this is cool (I talked about this in a prior […]

This weekend, my mom and boyfriend were visiting for my birthday (and for the latter, it’s  our 2-year dating anniversary tomorrow). We arrived at the bog around 3:30 PM to a few black-capped chickadees and a northern shrike, and made our way to McDavitt Rd. around 4 PM . We cruised the road slowly, talked […]

As mentioned in my prior post, the hurdles are steeper than I thought, but maybe I’ll at least keep chipping away at this one. One of my concerns is:  I have to do a line-by-line calculation for each line in a giant file, and I’m wondering if R will be too slow for this. Also, […]

I’m currently learning my way around Stella, to work with the WETLANDSCAPE models. I am working on comparing 10-day time step outputs to daily outputs, to see if the results are comparable. As you know, though, I hate closed source software, so working with something like this is…challenging. I was excited (and still sort of […]

I’m in the 1st half of the 1st day of my 30’s, so now it’s time to look forward. The last decade was about school, and earning my way to a Ph.D. This decade will be about career (though certainly not solely). I’m happy for where I am right now, and grateful for the foundation […]

Tomorrow is my birthday, so I thought I’d commemorate the end of my 20’s today. I started this decade as an undergraduate in physics, but I would soon switch to biology. The next year, when I was 21, I went onto my first field season in South Carolina for the project that would become my […]

There are old, curious records of willow ptarmigan in northern WI and MN, and I’ve always wondered what the story was there. I found a paper (reference at the bottom of the post) describing the biome changes that accompanied the transition from the Pleistocene to the Holocene. “From the west to the east, a new […]