So, let’s say you’re out banding migratory birds with unique color bands so you can tell individuals apart. You continue your study over several years to see how often the same birds come back, and for how long, to determine how long they live. Cormack-Jolly-Seber (CJS) models are designed to do help with that estimation: […]

To aid in planning to survey my block, particularly for nocturnal visits, aerial photos are a big help. Great horned owls are quite generalist when it comes to habitat. I’ve seen them in urban areas, perched on buildings in spaces that had nearby big trees, and on light posts on the edge of a parking lot. […]

It’s officially time to start making nocturnal visits to my block to look for great horned owls, so I made my 2nd visit tonight. Once I found my way to my block last night, I knew my way around a little better and started to come up with some route ideas.

I had a great horned owl calling outside my apartment in the early morning hours (12:39 AM), which prompted me to make my 1st visit to my atlas block tonight. It was mostly getting familiar with my block, and making the labeled points on the featured photo. Right now, my main target is indeed great […]

Today, we were secondary guides “Bog 1” which was great, but we need to rethink the strategy in upcoming trips. Perhaps oddly, the festival doesn’t have any trips geared toward the crepuscular hours, so people usually do that on their own (though great gray owl is perhaps the most sought-after target). Nonetheless, we made a […]

File this one under: problems I hope to explore with my exploratory data analysis (EDA) suite of tools I want to develop. Here’s my question: the cover photo graph shows line graphs from 2 different models (differing by temporal resolution). The pink line has an observation every 10 days, whereas the blue line has an […]

Though the following terms aren’t all the same, they describe whether or not breeding birds occupy the same territories as they did in the previous year. breeding dispersal – this is a commonly used term, especially in ornithology migratory nomadism – comes up in grassland bird literature fidelity – more broadly used in ecology site territory […]

Happy Groundhog Day! This time of year, in this locale, it’s always 6 weeks more of winter (at the very least). However, apparently they try their own version at the local zoo with a porcupine.

The aurora supposedly made an appearance tonight, in keeping with some recent solar activity. It has been so cloudy, though, and tonight was no exception.

This is my annual list keeping track of lifers and cool sightings! I’ll continue to update it but without changing the date. It will ultimately go into my end of year best sightings of the year. 🙂 curve-billed thrasher (1/14/17)