The rain has been coming down all day so far, and shows no sign of letting up. I’ve been watching a goldfinch linger on the Rudbeckia I planted for quite awhile, which is one of the most rewarding outcomes of my native gardening efforts. A roundup of some of my fav rainy day birding inspo: […]

Song is the only reliable way to identify this species in the field (without having one on in the hand, even call notes aren’t definitively separable from GCTH) so lucky and very cool find for this birder in PA: https://ebird.org/checklist/S398712177 Also this guy that apparently hung out the entire time we were in Portugal (until […]

I had the privilege of vacationing with my mom in Portugal this past week! It was a dual birthday celebration for us; an early gift trip for me, and events to celebrate her recent birthday. We had an amazing time! We had a laundry machine all but 2 nights at places we stayed, so we […]

I so recommend this AirBnB if you find yourself in north-central Portugal! They built a nice little courtyard atop the hillside building. After we checked out, we walked the Escadaria Nossa Senhora de Fátima and sat at a picnic table for a little while at the top.

I finally sold out dipped my toe in the water of seeing what was possible with connecting QGIS to an AI agent. For starters (or to show how behind the game I am) I had to learn what any of them are; I ended up going with the one some of my colleagues had talked […]

Happy summer! I walked from the entrance off Rt 9 past the west entrance on the red trail. Cool little park, will be back!

I decided to try my first foray into AI with QGIS on my work computer (i.e. Windows obligate) and trying to recreate a friend’s example I had to do the following things as a complete newbie: You can replace the entire file with this and save it, and Claude will just add all the default […]

I’m back to my backyard, and am doing a synopsis of what’s been happening this season. I’ve had a nest of guinea paper wasps on the fence, but out of a desire to not disturb them(!) I haven’t checked on them. I’ve also had a few crab spiders on my flowers, but iNaturalist reviewers seem […]

I did a “bucket list” hike to the summit of Slide Mountain today! I took the path up here and took the Curtis-Ormsbee Trail back. I haven’t done a mountain hike in years, so it was tough! It was a good encouragement to get back into peak (pun intended) hiking shape to explore more of […]

I had to make a leaflet map for a work project with sensitive data, and as the backdrop I used the following layers: