Bird vs. Fish

Jan. Rare Birds – St. Louis Co., MN

On the 1st of each month, I post my favorite historic sightings that occurred within that month in my current county of residence. Enjoy, and good birding! willow ptarmigan (continuing from the December post)

My Favorite Bird Encounters of 2019

The year started with a bang with great looks at my lifer king eider on Jan 2! Then, we had our best ever year guiding the Sax-Zim Birding Festival. We had all of the usual suspect owls in the bog (2/16): great gray, northern hawk and snowy! I have never guided when we had all […]

Lifers at Sax-Zim Bog

This is such a special place; I decided to kick off my birthday weekend here this evening! I added another lifer to the list, but this time a mammal: red-backed vole! So I decided to tally up the lifer animal species I’ve found here. Great gray owl Evening grosbeak Black-backed woodpecker boreal chickadee Moose Marten […]

Ratified Raster Brick

This is a script that takes selected fields (selected_fields) from a shape file and turns each into a raster. If the field is character-based categories, it ratifies the raster. At the end, you have a list of rasters. You can then bind these into a brick or perform other list-wise operations on them. require(rgdal) library(sf) […]

Dec. Rare Birds of St. Louis Co., MN

Dare to dream, birders of St. Louis Co.! These are some of my favorite rarity accounts for the county from this month (many of which are admittedly quite dated). The date of my birthday marked the kickoff of the only documented “irruption” of willow ptarmigans into the state, now 86 years ago. Interesting to see […]

Stop 4: Lava Flow Succession

This weekend we got a blessing of fall weather! Yesterday got into the mid-40’s, and today was 50°F! So, that ice finally melted off the ledges and I could get all the way out. To follow along with the stop description, check out the book share in the previous post Stop 4 (p. 135). Instead […]

GDAL: Dissolve All Polygons

ogr2ogr output_dissolved.shp forest_VGS.shp -dialect sqlite -sql “SELECT ST_Union(geometry) AS geometry FROM forest_VGS”

Weekend GIS Fun: Part 3

I had been referencing stops from the original north shore geology field trip guide, until I found an updated version of the guide in a book (embedded below p.132-144)! In this chapter, he lists the military grid reference system (MGRS) coordinates (Green 2011) so I entered them into a spreadsheet. I then downloaded it as […]

St. Louis Co., MN Rare Birds – Nov.

long-billed murrelet

Best Approach for Large Area Zonal Stats

The best solution I found was to chop up the state by county, crop the raster brick to that extent, and import it as a velox object. Then, I used velox extract to get the values.