Avian Ecologist

Winter Berry Bog

This was our 1st visit to this part of Sax-Zim Bog! There has been an ermine visiting the carcass there, but we didn’t see it this time.

Feb. Rare Birds – St. Louis Co., MN

On the 1st of each month, I post my favorite historic sightings that occurred within that month in my current county of residence. Enjoy, and good birding! willow ptarmigan (continuing from the December post) gray-crowned rosy-finch – the 2001 bird (continuing from Jan)

GDAL Rasterize

In this example, I had a shape file I wanted to use as a mask. However, the features were those I wanted to keep. In other words, I wanted to keep all the pixels that had values (i.e. not “no data”) that intersected with the shapes, and set those outside the shapes to 0. Then, […]

Lifers We Saw Together

As Valentine’s day season is well underway (yes, I’m one of those people) I decided to compile a (running) list of lifers that Paul and I saw together! This is the notation… heard only non-native Lifers for Us boreal owl gyrfalcon Smith’s longspur garganey Say’s phoebe rufous-crowned sparrow common poorwill Bewick’s wren greater roadrunner black-capped […]

Jan. Rare Birds – St. Louis Co., MN

On the 1st of each month, I post my favorite historic sightings that occurred within that month in my current county of residence. Enjoy, and good birding! willow ptarmigan (continuing from the December post) gray-crowned rosy-finch – In 2001, there was a bird hanging out around the port terminal. There was another one in the booming […]

My Favorite Bird Encounters of 2019

The year started with a bang with great looks at my lifer king eider on Jan 2! Then, we had our best ever year guiding the Sax-Zim Birding Festival. We had all of the usual suspect owls in the bog (2/16): great gray, northern hawk and snowy! I have never guided when we had all […]

Lifers at Sax-Zim Bog

This is such a special place; I decided to kick off my birthday weekend here this evening! I added another lifer to the list, but this time a mammal: red-backed vole! So I decided to tally up the lifer animal species I’ve found here. Great gray owl Evening grosbeak Black-backed woodpecker boreal chickadee Moose Marten […]

Ratified Raster Brick

This is a script that takes selected fields (selected_fields) from a shape file and turns each into a raster. If the field is character-based categories, it ratifies the raster. At the end, you have a list of rasters. You can then bind these into a brick or perform other list-wise operations on them. require(rgdal) library(sf) […]

Dec. Rare Birds of St. Louis Co., MN

Dare to dream, birders of St. Louis Co.! These are some of my favorite rarity accounts for the county from this month (many of which are admittedly quite dated). The date of my birthday marked the kickoff of the only documented “irruption” of willow ptarmigans into the state, now 86 years ago. Interesting to see […]

Stop 4: Lava Flow Succession

This weekend we got a blessing of fall weather! Yesterday got into the mid-40’s, and today was 50°F! So, that ice finally melted off the ledges and I could get all the way out. To follow along with the stop description, check out the book share in the previous post Stop 4 (p. 135). Instead […]