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 might be my last winter here, I may not find this species breeding in my atlas block, without some serious luck and/or spotting a nest!
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 not quite fast or efficient enough for the full analysis I want to run. It’s taking too long for a re-analysis. I’m exploring whether or not it’s still the best thing available.
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, and then hunted the ditch below. It dove, but I’m not sure if it caught prey. Then, it flew off from the ground toward the lake. I lost it as it flew through a yard behind a house.
Here in MN they should start ramping up vocalizations soon! I wonder where it’s headed, and will have to go to potential areas nearby in the evenings to listen.
Before I forget: sudo apt-get -f install
Today’s bird of the day is: ring-billed gull!
Birds I’ve covered for my twitter game so far are…
So I don’t really get spring break anymore, but I’m thinking about heading to the Black Hills Mar. 24-Apr. 1 this year. I want to bee-line to the Badlands (get to Blue Earth, MN Friday night and drive the rest of the way Saturday). I hope to catch some straggling gray-crowned rosy-finches before they’ve left for their breeding grounds. Canyon wrens should be singing by then. Maybe sage thrashers will moving through? I wonder if it’s too early for Cordilleran flycatcher.
What good fortune that I looked up advances in Bayesian methods the day a new task view was published! If you’re just starting with Bayes, they even have packages listed here designed to help you learn. I’ve been using R-INLA and for a few reasons I became curious what else was out there. I’m still assuming Laplace estimations are faster than Markov chain Monte Carlo, so there are more on the list that might be good to check out if I abandon that method altogether.
There are also interesting choices for model averaging (and ensembles), time series, extreme value, clustering, threshold, change point and auto-regressive models.