Avian Ecologist

Why Am I Procrastinating?

I’m happy to get back to work, but there’s some sort of a fear too, that is heavily associated with procrastination. Heck, I’m procrastinating by writing this post, but I’m rationalizing it by at least trying to better understand my urge and do something about it. I haven’t always been like this, and I have […]

The Element of Discovery in Birding

I’m not much of a lister beyond keeping a life list, but admittedly adding “lifers” is my favorite part of birding. Maybe the main part of what drives me in birding is what also drives me in being a naturalist: there’s so much to see in the natural world! You couldn’t see it all in […]

Psychological Theories & Bird Identification

Here’s a cross-disciplinary thought about how we identify birds: we seem to wrestle between bottom-up and top-down processing. Bottom-up processing of visual information is what we imagine to be our “raw perception”: we sense light with our eyes which we eventually translate into what our brains interpret. It’s the most intuitive and direct model of […]

Total Eclipse at Blue Sky Vineyard

Our completely serendipitous journey to totality was amazing in every respect. Our last minute plans to drive to southern IL, the closest spot to us within the totality path, earned us a hotel no closer than Decatur Sunday night, which left about 3 hours of driving to get to the middle of the totality swath […]

Why is Color Our 1st Instinct for ID?

One of my first “slap on the wrists” as a birder was to look at color last, whereas it seems we want to look at it first. Why is that? Our processing of color begins in the retina, whereas we don’t process form of what we’re looking at until the visual cortex! “Many cells in V1 […]

What I’ve Learned About Teaching

I haven’t had extensive classroom teaching experience yet: I TA’ed forestry practicum twice over the summer at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and TA’ed 2 sections of introductory astronomy lab when I was an undergrad. My students helped teach me how to helpfully communicate new concepts, and a few ubiquitous patterns played out, such as: you always get […]

The Steps to Getting Started Birding

Just look/listen from your window, deck, backyard, etc.! Notice birds you see around you. Take note of what you can identify and what you can’t (sights and sounds) and let your curiosity drive you to investigate. Get a good field guide and study up! Learn what’s around you by looking at seasonality and range maps. […]

Learning to use Google Earth Engine

I’m poking my way around Google Earth Engine and seeing what’s here, as well as learning some basics of the web IDE. They have image and feature collections, accessible through functions… ImageCollection() FeatureCollection() You can pass the name of a collection to FeatureCollection() to query it. Sometimes these are actually Fusion Tables. It’s kind of […]

My Experiences as a Student

This is my processing of what I’ve experienced, having been a professional, full-time student until last year, when I finished my Ph.D. at 29. At this point, I’ve sat in classrooms much more than I’ve been in front of them, and I can perhaps illustrate the brokenness of the curriculum/semester/grading/course scheme best through my experience […]

Recommendations for Birding Gear

I was heartened to see that even Popular Mechanics is getting into birding in their own way, but I wanted to make a few tweaks to this list, as, well, a birder! Here are some additional or alternative things to consider purchasing for your birding ventures… spotting scope: I have a Swarovski 80mm ATS angled spotting […]