I’ll need to use my vacation days wisely, but if I do look for a change of scenery in the winter, it looks like Badlands may be the closest road trip.

Of course, this is preeminent on my mind! I’m happy to finally live within the land of yellow rails, and I’ll be trying hard to listen on dark nights come spring 2017! Then, a venture to the western edge of the state will hopefully bring chestnut-collared longspurs, Sprague’s pipit and Baird’s sparrow.

Today, I signed a lease in my new home state! I have an apartment, but still need to get some basic furnishings, etc. before it starts to feel like home. I’m really lucky to live in a great part of town with lots of good birding opportunities.

Today we head west to Wall, SD. We’re a little late for most breeding birds, but we’ll hold out hope to catch migrants. If we did this earlier (as originally planned), we may have had a better chance of running into black-headed grosbeak along the way.

Finally, I’m taking the time to do what I should have done long ago: actually see the places I studied! This is Day 3 of our adventuring, and we crossed over into the Prairie Potholes. We’re staying in Watertown, SD tonight.

Today I moved out of Madison and headed to Duluth to try to not be homeless. Then, we went straight for International Falls to stay the night!

I’m finally biting the bullet and trying to do some basic spatial modeling with my analyses. My 1st test case is a single species (bobolink) as it occurs in my Ch 2 study region (Badlands and Prairies, Potholes and Hardwood Transition). I have created points in the middle of each of my BBS route segments […]

I finally found this lifer Karner blue butterfly!

We tried in vain for yellow rails, again. We knew it was probably too late in the season, but were encouraged by a single heard individual last week.

We were honored when one of our keynote speakers wanted to go birding with us for the day. He mentioned that he was trying to recreate his life list in e-Bird, and thus fill in the gaps that weren’t now recorded in his personal electronic database. He looked up his “needs list” for Dane Co., […]