These butterflies “peak” in Wisconsin approx. May 19-25. In other counties, I might be lucky to find some of the duskywings, which as a group peak in the later half of May. West Virginia white hoary elfin frosted elfin mottled duskywing Persius duskywing cobweb skipper

I mentioned a northern species that emerges early up north, but aside from that, this week really seems to be the first big “push” of butterflies! I made this list of dates from the histograms on Wisconsin Butterflies. I went through every species, and picked its first seasonal “peak,” and then listed it by its […]

if I close the terminal window, the connection stays on (i.e. I can still access my local Datalab site via the browser) it doesn’t stay indefinitely (maybe closes when I shut down?) so I can’t perpetually access that site to reconnect after you’ve installed and setup the workspace (from Google instructions)… export GCP_PROJECT_ID=YOUR_PROJECT_ID export CONTAINER_IMAGE_NAME=gcr.io/earthengine-project/datalab-ee:latest […]

Tonight, we went to McGregor Marsh, the best spot in the state to find yellow rails. I’ve been many a time before, eventually deciding last summer that someone must be playing a colossal practical joke on me and that those birds weren’t actually there. 😉 Yellow rail are hard to find; in fact, I’d say […]

I’m thrilled to say we finally saw another great horned owl in my atlas block tonight, about a year since my only other sighting! We staked it out as it was hunting, and we lost it when it flew almost parallel the road toward 11th street. We drove down 11th street hoping to relocate it, […]

model 1 forest guild took ~3.73 days, 17G RAM, all 4 CPU cores

Will this lingering, late snow make it easier to spot mammals that dramatically molt between seasons? I’ve been seeing posts on the local naturalist groups of molting snowshoe hares and ermine, who are adopting their summer color perhaps too fast for this (very) late spring! For instance, check out this photo posted today to the […]

Yesterday, I tuned into an ultra-conservative Eau Claire radio station with a local host denying climate change. She had on a meteorologist who also didn’t believe in climate change, so I don’t know if this piece was to some degree reactionary or just a coincidence. Anyway, while I’m tempted to rant for myself against this […]

I have access to a supercomputer (and maybe more upcoming) and I’d like to try out making my workflow parallel. Back when I used HTCondor, I broke down my script to hypothetically do it, but ran into some snafus and didn’t quite end up implementing it on their system. Anyway, I’m ready to try again […]

Is this really spring…?! Today I was supposed to complete my drive back up north, and am delayed by a snowstorm hitting the entirety of Wisconsin! Could it be climate change? When weather records are broken, you always have to wonder. As a researcher, I’m excited to see what comes next from this groundbreaking study. Roads […]