Bird vs. Fish

Thinking of Birding As “Serious Leisure”

My colleague and friend Dr. Susan I. Stewart pointed me in the right direction regarding terminology of the recreation, leisure and tourism disciplines, in order to turn up literature about birding. “Serious leisure” investigates the recruitment and retention of people into pursuits that are more serious than common notions of recreation, but still considered a hobby […]

How This Problematic NetCDF File Was Fixed

I can’t be thankful enough for my godsend Twitter friend/NetCDF guru Michael Sumner for coming in clutch to rectify this problematic file! As I take my baby steps in learning how to deal with NetCDF files (~3 weeks after being thrown into the “deep end” and trying to tread water), I realized that one of […]

Next NetCDF Issue I Discovered Today

Another problem I ran into: apparently Nov-Dec. 1999 monthly averages for HADCM3 B1 precipitation, where I flipped the axes in NCO, are blank. problem <- brick(“hadcm3.b1.pr.NAm.grid_monthly.nc_out.nc”) plot(problem$X1999.11.15) plot(problem$X1999.12.16) The above returns the correct axes, but blank plots. The problem is present before I flipped the axes, so I have to go back to the original […]

My 1st Breeding Bird Survey Route!

It feels appropriate that I made my 1st contribution to the BBS today, as a form of conservation patriotism! It’s one of the longest-running and most extensive citizen science efforts in the world, and I was happy to kick off my Independence Day contributing to this data set. The timing also comes on the heels […]

What Does it Mean to be a Birder?

What is a birder, anyway? Several birders have made stabs at what it is to be defined as a birder, in part spurred by questions of how to count how many of us are out there. First, the Birdwatcher’s Companion (2004) seek’s to differentiate “birding” from “bird-watching,” as terminology has notably changed over the past 20 […]

July Blooms

round-leaved orchid slender lady’s-tresses club-spur orchid (bog) spotted coralroot (Ridges) cross-leaved milkwort field milkwort whorled milkwort winged loosestrife false-loosestrife rough-seeded clammy-weed common dodder false pimpernel large-flowered yellow false foxglove eastern figwort Canada horse-balm marsh hedge-nettle American water-horehound northern water-horehound flat-leaved bladderwort brook lobelia Jimsonweed Apple-of-Peru Virginia ground-cherry round-headed bush-clover prairie bush-clover Illinois tick-trefoil partridge pea […]

How I’ve Been Processing Climate Data

From a THREDDS server, I’m using the NetcdfSubset portal to obtain a spatial subset of my climate data set of interest. Since the files I need are too big to download from their HTTP server, they instead give me an OPeNDAP URI with the spatial subset info. I then pass that to nccopy from the […]

And Now for a Windows Hack in a Pinch…

For reasons I won’t describe here, I had to quickly install nco on Windows, and figure out how to use the command line to loop over files in a given directory. So, I navigated to the folder where I have nco on the command line, and ran this to loop over the files in my […]

Spatially Manipulating NetCDF Files

I ended up getting a bunch of climate NetCDF files from a colleague for each combination of climate model, climate change scenario and variable. So, what I have is a list of 3-D files consisting of observations/predictions of a given weather variable over latitude, longitude and time (you can picture them as cubes, if you […]

Hummingbird Feeder Up on the Deck

I put my hummingbird feeder back up today, which I suspect is the only feeder my neighbor below me won’t complain about. (Even so, it’s well-hidden from the outside by the pole in front of it.) My neighbors to the west of me have 2 and have a resident pair of hummingbirds. I’m hoping they’ll […]