I put the camera on the ground in the backyard, and captured my quarry: white-crowned sparrow! The most I counted at a time was 4 individuals. These birds looked closest to the eastern taiga subspecies, but I wonder if we might get individuals from the inter-grade zone. Probably the thing I love most about the feeder cam is […]

What else would you expect, then, but a house sparrow? They’re now abundant across the U.S., and not many people’s favorite birds (here) because they evict cavity nesting birds. Yet, I get many pictures of them! As a conservationist, I’m guilty of just being annoyed by them and wanting them gone. As an ecologist, though, […]

I run all my BBS analyses on our Linux servers, so I’ve picked up some bash scripting tricks along the way. If you have a screen you want to kill (and there are multiple running), first find its name and then kill it. screen -ls screen -X -S [session # you want to kill] kill […]

(This post is backdated in keeping with the chronology of the camera footage.) Either there’s some delay in the camera transferring images to the card, or I overlooked this (entirely possible), but I captured a white-crowned sparrow on the front feeder cam! I was hoping to, because the camera can still get the wi-fi there, […]

This has become a favorite destination of mine for the Big Green Birding Year (BIGBY). Today, in honor of the end of National Wildflower Week, we found red trillium!

In 1851, the original land surveyors described the area as a wet, quaking marsh, “over which we crossed with not a little danger to our lives.”

I’m working on “the standard” FRAGSTATS questions within buffers of BBS routes. I need to compute spatial stats for each region (i.e. BBS buffer) using the National Land Cover Data (NLCD) 2011. Patch Grid has a convenient tool, Spatial Statistics (by Regions) to compute FRAGSTATS metrics by shape file-defined areas. Unfortunately, though, I get a cryptic “error […]

My analyses are computationally intensive, so I whittle down the data frame as much as I can. For one, I drop columns I don’t need. BBS$countrynum <- NULL It’s also convenient that routes are associated with regions in the routes.csv file. So, once I merge that data, I can choose to keep only routes in […]

I found my first ever morels today (with help)! First, we found Morchella prava. Then, we found a young yellow(?) morel; I’m thinking esculentoides but not sure. So, to my knowledge, we may have only found yellow morels; I haven’t for sure found any black morels. Apparently, they fruit earlier, so I wonder if we missed them. Further on the […]

I use North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data to examine broad-scale bird population trends in relation to weather (Thogmartin et al. 2007 – bonus, that guy is on our project team!) He has even done work very related to my 1st chapter (Thogmartin et al. 2006). In any case, the initial motivation of the […]