Tasty sh*t, originally uploaded by Gavatron. So, I’m back from my spring fling as the director of the Camp Arowhon Outdoor Centre. What, you may ask, does this have to do with ants eating the left-overs of some animal’s digestive tract? Well, on the surface, not much other than I took the photo while at […]
I’m in the last throws of packing for a month away, directing the Camp Arowhon Outdoor Centre. It’s one of the many hats that I wear in addition to being a PhD student. I started working for Camp Arowhon in 1998, so my return marks a decade! Ollie’s coming up for the month, so I’m […]
I keep an eye out for newspaper articles published on birding as I find they provide an interesting insight into the larger cultural perception of the activity. While I’m not doing a discourse analysis of this stuff, a recent article published in the New York Times (Prairie Birds Flirt, and a Town Livens Up) hits […]
So I’m well passed the halfway mark for my tenure conducting birder research here at Rondeau Provincial Park. I’ve got sixteen interviews in the hopper and could get a couple more before I leave on Saturday. While the birding hasn’t been stellar (it’s been “thin” as someone today described it), I’m really pleased with the […]
OK, let me do a quick re-cap. Last week? Boston for the AAG. Week before that? Austin for Leesa’s project. Up next? Two weeks at Rondeau Provincial Park, collecting data for my dissertation. I would have liked a bit more time between Boston and Rondeau, but no dice. So I’ve been spending this week getting […]
Without making this post into a reminiscence about my youth and Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, I am off to Austin, Texas tomorrow with my supervisor (Dr. Leesa Fawcett) to assist with a research project on animal minds. We’re going to be interviewing Dr. Merlin Tuttle, founder of Bat Conservation International (a non-profit whose mission you […]
Urban birds that nest in wooded areas don’t do as well (reproductively-speaking) as their non-urban counterparts. Conventional wisdom suggested that this was because of the presence of more egg-eating predators (eating bird eggs, obviously) in urban settings. New research suggests, however, that it might have more to do with fitter (larger, older) birds preferring (and […]
Got the good news in the past couple of days that the tour I lead to the Yukon and Alaska for Quest Nature Tours is booked up for this coming June. This, of course, means a trip to Whitehorse, Dawson City, Tok and Haines Junction. New for me this year is a ferry ride from […]
I loves me some Flickr. I loves me some statistics. Well, perhaps love is too strong a word…needless to say I’m a fan of looking behind the curtain (()). So, for your viewing pleasure tonight, the top search terms from Yahoo Image Search that made their way to my photos: Long story short? If I […]
I’m supposed to be turning an abstract I wrote into a paper and I’m having some troubles beginning. So rather than staring at the computer screen all day wondering how to begin, I’m going to try banging out my ideas here and see if that gives me a kernel to begin my “real” paper. I’m […]