I had a new species captured recently now that the feeder cam is on the ground! Seeing the bird puffed up below a window at first made me wary, but I don’t think it was a window casualty. The window it’s below is buffered by an outer screen on the lower half, and is usually […]

Fitting Bayesian models has gotten even better with the R package INLA. The fact that it’s integrated into R has led to more simplistic scripting, and the approach means much reduced computational time. There is a lot of literature out there about “why and how” the integrated nested Laplace approximation, which is why my treatment of it in this blog […]

First, get to the right webpage, click the button that says “Retrieve Raw Data” and then “Proceed to FTP site.” There, you’ll find lots of files, including README’s with data descriptions. Look at README.txt to see what each of the listed files includes. Grab useful information: I recommend you download… routes.zip: I use the CSV in […]

I like to start with a clean slate. Set your working directory to wherever you store your BBS, etc. files that will go into the script. rm(list = ls()) setwd(“”) Here, you need to put the full path to the BBS files. library(data.table) BBS <- rbindlist(lapply(list.files(“”,full.names=TRUE),read.csv)) This following line creates a unique identifier for each […]

If you want to use the finer-scale BBS data, here’s a tweak to the R code I presented. In this case, you won’t want the SpeciesTotal, country number (perhaps, otherwise add it it to the ID variables) or StopTotal (again, I assume). BBS$countrynum <- NULL BBS$SpeciesTotal <- NULL BBS$StopTotal <- NULL Then, you’re going to […]

There’s a great data set of worldwide bird ranges that you have to request. They have breeding, wintering, and resident ranges of every species for which they have data in shape files. Once you get it, though, you can work with it using GIS. As usual, I like to script things. I downloaded all the […]

Let’s start with simple listing (i.e. all of your rasters are in one folder). Start the script with the basics. import os import arcpy from arcpy import env env.workspace = “wherever your stuff is” Make sure you’re in the right place and Arc is “seeing” your files by just running arcpy.ListRasters() after you set the […]

As I’ve mentioned in prior posts, my Audubon Wingscapes feeder cam doesn’t really focus closely. It claims the range is 18-23″, but to get a crisp photo, you really need to be at the far edge of that range. Alas, the mounting arm I bought specifically for this camera is pretty short. I decided to mount […]

Happy Earth Day! Go birding 🙂 gray partridge yellow rail black-legged kittiwake I’m moving my feeder cam to the ground, in part because of logistics but in part inspired by the prevalence of possible feeder bird rarity records this time of year that forage on the ground. For example… hermit warbler black-throated sparrow Baird’s sparrow […]

We walked down to spring trail pond in the arboretum this evening, and there was a garter snake slithering through the underbrush at the wood edge!