Bird vs. Fish

Planning for Birding in Seattle this Fall!

My boyfriend and I will be joining my parents on vacation to Seattle in Sept! (Species in bold are things we may have a good chance of seeing given the timing of our visit.) As it turns out, my parents are interested in birding with us too! I’m not sure how far they’ll want to go, […]

Why Reputation Matters in Birding

Now we’re getting into a little bit of a sticky topic: how and why your reputation as a birder matters, and what it has engendered in birding! Birding is an “honor-based” hobby. That means that no one else can tell you you didn’t see something if you say you did. However, this is where the […]

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 […]