(This post is backdated in keeping with the chronology of the camera footage.) Either there’s some delay in the camera transferring images to the card, or I overlooked this (entirely possible), but I captured a white-crowned sparrow on the front feeder cam! I was hoping to, because the camera can still get the wi-fi there, […]

This has become a favorite destination of mine for the Big Green Birding Year (BIGBY). Today, in honor of the end of National Wildflower Week, we found red trillium!

In 1851, the original land surveyors described the area as a wet, quaking marsh, “over which we crossed with not a little danger to our lives.”

I’m working on “the standard” FRAGSTATS questions within buffers of BBS routes. I need to compute spatial stats for each region (i.e. BBS buffer) using the National Land Cover Data (NLCD) 2011. Patch Grid has a convenient tool, Spatial Statistics (by Regions) to compute FRAGSTATS metrics by shape file-defined areas. Unfortunately, though, I get a cryptic “error […]

My analyses are computationally intensive, so I whittle down the data frame as much as I can. For one, I drop columns I don’t need. BBS$countrynum <- NULL It’s also convenient that routes are associated with regions in the routes.csv file. So, once I merge that data, I can choose to keep only routes in […]

I found my first ever morels today (with help)! First, we found Morchella prava. Then, we found a young yellow(?) morel; I’m thinking esculentoides but not sure. So, to my knowledge, we may have only found yellow morels; I haven’t for sure found any black morels. Apparently, they fruit earlier, so I wonder if we missed them. Further on the […]

I use North American Breeding Bird Survey (BBS) data to examine broad-scale bird population trends in relation to weather (Thogmartin et al. 2007 – bonus, that guy is on our project team!) He has even done work very related to my 1st chapter (Thogmartin et al. 2006). In any case, the initial motivation of the […]

I think I’m capturing molting of an eastern chipmunk in some of these photos: in late spring, male chipmunks molt into their summer coat. Apparently, the molt sequence is the same as that of red squirrel, so I tracked down the old paper describing red squirrel molt to compare notes with the chipmunk photos (Yerger 1955). “The first […]

Happy May Day! Go bird-watching! During this week in Wisconsin’s history, these species have been found in past years… black-throated sparrow Baird’s sparrow

It was great to end the month with a lifer: a ruff that stopped over at Horicon National Wildlife Refuge! I saw the post on Wisconsin Rare Bird Alert and immediately hopped in the car with my optics. The clouds parted and the rain stopped long enough to make it out to the boardwalk, though […]