Avian Ecologist

My Top 10 Favorite Things About Being a Birder

I’ve always had a natural curiosity about birds for as long as I can remember, but I didn’t really get hooked into birding until I learned more about it in undergrad. When I took ornithology lab, I learned how to learn bird song, and I learned more about my local birds (including seasonality of occurrence). […]

#NameThatBirdSong Updated List

I run a science communication (#scicomm) game on Twitter every Weds using the hashtag in the post title. At noon central time I post a challenge bird of the week! 🙂 This week’s bird is the red-winged blackbird! Meanwhile here’s a compilation of the last few months’ birds… red-tailed hawk western meadowlawk eastern whip-poor-will mourning […]

Note to Self… (Lab Notebook Entry)

Network script as currently written runs single core but with lots of memory needs…

April Wildflowers of the Upper Midwest

These are some of the earliest bloomers in Wisconsin (by no means an exhaustive list). golden corydalis Pennsylvania bittercress Carolina whitlow-grass field pennycress little-pod false flax hillside blueberry blue bugle low calamint phlox downy sand violet wood-sorrel hoary puccoon violet great-spurred violet lance-leaved foamflower nodding chickweed crane’s-bill buttercup prairie creeping Carolina anemone dandelion prairie false […]

Prairie Pothole Region (PPR) Migration

Today, we drove most of the way back home, traversing the PPR on our way from Chamberlain, SD to Minneapolis. It’s peak waterfowl migration here, with ponds just thawed in the Dakotas. We took some back roads to check out the potholes filled with ducks. Along the way, we saw Krider’s red-tailed hawks and a […]

Thunder Basin National Grassland

Today we visited the Keyton 1 greater sage-grouse lek and were treated to a high count of 25 males and 17 females! With the main aim of our trip achieved, we backtracked through Badlands NP to make the most of our entry fee. 🙂 We saw courting prairie falcons flying around over a ridge in the […]

Driving through South Dakota!

After waiting out winter storm Uma yesterday, today we officially head west! Here’s a study area description of SD copied from a neat paper. “The study area was the state of South Dakota, as well as portions of the Black Hills extending into Crook County, Wyoming (Fig. 1). South Dakota was glaciated east of the […]

Idea for Running My Models on HPC

So I think I’m going to try running models parallel within the script. I’ll restrict runs to a single core, because the new HPC system should have plenty of memory to accommodate each run. I want to use “future” because it seems to be quickly becoming all the rage!

Making a Parallel Workflow for HPC

I’ve learned about some options I didn’t know that allow for running lines parallel right within the R script. In that article, the author refers to how I was conceiving the workflow as “poor man’s parallel.” 🙂 So, I might combine the newer technique by running the models parallel within the script, and creating an […]

End of Peak Barred Owl “Hooting Season”

While there’s a chance to hear them anytime of the year here, the “best window” to pin down their territory wraps up about now. “In Minnesota, calling occurs in all months of the year, but most frequent in Feb and early Mar, prior to egg-laying (Dunstan and Sample 1972). Another peak in late summer and […]