Avian Ecologist

Little Missouri National Grassland

During the heat of the day, we visited some sights in Bismarck to pass the afternoon, most notably the Heritage Center & State museum. Then, we checked into Teddy Roosevelt National Park in the late afternoon to get a pass and drive around a little. We spent the evening driving some roads in the grasslands! […]

Sibley Nature Park

We drove around the farm fields in Kunkel School District and saw a Richardson’s ground squirrel. Then, we saw our lifer black-headed grosbeak at Camp Neche!

ND Vacation!

Today our vacation kicks off. We made it to Fargo tonight to get a good start heading west tomorrow!

Anthropology & Ornithology

It’s interesting to me that so many ancient cultures named birds by their sound, and I think it’s related to why birds are so relatively easy to sample today: they make noise, and somewhat predictably! When we do point counts, most species are detected aurally. So, in the soundscape, it would have made sense for […]

White M Hairstreak

This is the week to look for a rare stray butterfly…but admittedly, not likely up here!

#NameThatBirdSong Digest

This week’s bird of the week is American goldfinch! Here’s the collection of birds that has been featured this spring/summer: chipping sparrow red-eyed vireo warbling vireo song sparrow chestnut-sided warbler Baltimore oriole merlin common grackle

Linux: Find Tricks

I used this to find files whose names match a regular expression, that also aren’t empty. Then I cut the filenames by underscores and kept the 2nd field. I dumped that list into a file. find -name “o*” -size +0 | cut -d “_” -f 2 > successful_model ls results_copy > filenames ls results_copy | […]

WI Butterflies – End of July

All of them are found in Douglas Co. (with varying commonness)! mustard white purplish fritillary common branded skipper

A Laptop Overhaul

Long story short, my computer was having some serious issues that led me to back up all my files, update my BIOS and get rid of my Ubuntu partition to reinstall Windows. It’s not so bad, though, in that it gives me a really fresh start to re-envision my hard drive partitioning. The only thing […]

Lab Notebook: Trials & Errors

So I think in trying out the R package “inlabru,” and then installing all sorts of experimental updates/upgrades to try to debug it, I broke the dependencies (or something) for my R-INLA install on the HPC system. Now I can’t run R-INLA models without getting some sort of error. I’m waiting to see if we […]