In April 2024, I hosted a webinar for our grad student seminar in Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Oklahoma State University. Guest speakers were doctors Cassie Freund, Ben Padilla, and Andrea Wishart. In this webinar, Cassie, Ben, and Andrea discuss their paths to building careers outside academia, the skills that have carried over from their PhD research, and their perspectives on questions from the students.
I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on the terms #birding and #birdwatching. As I’m often explaining them to students from hunting backgrounds, I will usually lean into the word “hunting” for perspective.
The hunt is all about planning, practicing, preparation, etc. You develop a deep understanding of your quarry so you can predict where it might appear on a given day (that you can take off from work) at a particular time and under specific weather conditions. Many times you will go afield and fail to locate the deer, turkey, etc. that you’re after. Often you’ll have success in finding them but not be in good position to take a shot. Oh, and the typical options for your comfort while sitting quietly in the woods are 1) sweat- and tick-covered or 2) bone-numbingly cold.
And then sometimes it all works out and you squeeze the trigger or release the arrow, leading to the successful harvest form which you’ll reap material and emotional benefits from the experience long into the future.
In terms of the time and energy invested in the hunt, the actual harvest is an infinitesimal portion. That’s why we call it hunting and not “deer-shooting”.
And that’s why I call it birding and not bird watching. The actual watching of birds is a tiny part of the whole experience of predicting what might be and see what is, out there.
A decent analogy, right?
So then here comes Ed Yong – novice but enthusiastic birder – being his effortlessly brilliant self and, through the lens of a slightly different take on the term “birder”, gifts us with a far better analogy. In his latest NYTimes column, Yong is delighted to be considered a birder when he yet feels like a neophyte. He compares it to our use of dancer: anyone can dance, but we don’t typically label someone a dancer without an understanding that they’ve invested time and effort and training to reach a level of expertise worthy of the term. But birders? You don’t have to know much at all to be a birder –– and we’ll start calling you one the minute you first go birding.
I like that. For too long there’s been an air of elitism attached to birding whereby the serious people are birders and the casual folks are bird watchers. But I don’t know anyone who uses the terms that way, and I certainly don’t. If you bird (verb), then you are a birder. I’m glad that’s been Yong’s experience and super-glad that he expressed so in writing.
Maybe it works because there is no level of experience or proficiency that makes sense to discriminate birders from some novice levels. Birding is a continuum of lifelong learning and discovery, with each of us a novice somewhere on that trajectory. That, I suppose, is where the magic lies: birding is infinitely accessible yet endlessly fascinating. That’s why when people describe feelings of boredom, I can’t fully relate. I’m a birder.
This was the inaugural post on the blog I started 7 September, 2009: Bird-Window Collisions at OK State. I didn’t think that 14 years later we’d finally have an opportunity to assess the efficacy of window treatments to reduce collisions on campus, but here we are.
For 10 years I walked the perimeter of the Noble Research Center to document collisions of birds with its multi-facade exterior of reflective and transparent glass, sharing daily updates like this one. I quickly learned that there were few casualties in winter so many of my seasonal checks were done weekly. Otherwise, my goal was _every day_ and, on average, I ran a survey about every 2 days over those 10 years. Given that the average time for carcasses to persist was nearly 11 days, I didn’t miss much. In all, I found 442 birds of 67 species that died in collisions with glass at the NRC, 2009–2019.
Scott and I continue to collaborate on collisions, and we’ve recently developed an effort with the help of Feather Friendly to install mitigation window markings on key building facades here on campus at Oklahoma State University. Significantly, OSU also supported the effort with funds for a graduate student to help us study the efficacy of the window markings to reduce collisions. There’s more to learn about the project here. Beginning 2023, let’s see how many more birds we can help pass the gauntlet through our campus. Each facade we treat is an incremental reduction in mortality for dozens of our native birds.
One one of the morning field trips, Andy and I found ourselves in the company of another birder and with our invited speaker for the banquet, woodpecker expert Dr. Jerome Jackson from Florida Gulf Coast University. The four of us were spending a delightful morning of birding and botanizing along one of the refuge’s trails.
At one point, we came upon two black vultures sitting rather tight (i.e., not easily flushed by our presence), and Jerry remarked that the birds were keeping watch over their nest – somewhere in the “deepest, darkest part” of that tangle we would find two fluffy, buffy, musty-smelling black…
Alas, the ongoing crumbling of Twitter means I’ve been locked out because of a glitch in their two-factor authentication. After a decade, nearly 16k followers, and 130k tweets, I’ve got mixed feelings. Hence a rare revival of the blog.
On the one hand, Müsk is trash, and I’d been slowly disengaging from the site since early 2022. But I also wish I could have said farewell on my own terms. There’s a slim chance this post will auto-post to twitter, so perhaps this is it?
Folks, it’s been a blast.
Twitter brought me so much joy, so many friends (so many!), professional collaborations, and wonderful personal connections that will remain forever in my heart.
It made LGBTQ+ STEM into what it is today and brought together a queer science, tech, engineering & maths community. It filled my heart with joy.
Originally posted on The Waterthrush Blog: I spend a lot of time bragging about the 15 graduate students who’ve worked in my lab but this post is inspired by the 28 undergraduates I’ve had the good fortune to mentor in…
Anyone familiar with prairies has likely seen drawings and photographs showing the incredibly deep root systems of prairie grasses and other grassland plants. The prairie ecologist J.E. Weaver, in particular, is well known for his illustrations of long roots extending below prairie plants. That root depth is frequently held up as a major factor that influences the resilience of prairies in the face of summer drought. After all, deep roots allow those plants to draw water from far down in the soil profile when rainfall becomes scarce. It’s one of the defining components of prairie ecosystems.
There’s just one problem.
Prairies don’t actually work that way.
Yes, prairie grasses and wildflowers have very deep roots, but research over the last decade or so has built a strong case against the idea that those plants use their deep roots to find moisture during times of scarcity. In fact, they might not…
Joan Stenger sent me an email recently about an unusual waterfowl observation. On a recent Saturday, she visited downtown Bristol where the creek widens a bit near the fire station and beside the park. Joan wrote that she saw a flock of ducks and Canada geese and enjoyed watching them.
Photo by Bryan Stevens Muscovy ducks seen outside of Texas are domesticated versions of the wild waterfowl. Male Muscovy ducks sport red carbuncles around their bills.
“One fellow stood on the opposite bank and had bright red marks on his face,” she added. “My daughter and I went over the bridge and into the park to get closer and hopefully get a better view.”
Originally posted on The Waterthrush Blog: You’ve heard the story before, and it’s sobering: Once perhaps the most abundant vertebrate on the planet, a combination of unremitting exploitation and habitat loss reduced the Passenger Pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) from billions to…
There’s CDC or other institutional guidance, and there’s “what this person does” guidance. Both can be informative for how individuals manage their behavior during a deadly, global pandemic. Judging from a recent conversation I’ve had elsewhere, there might be some value in sharing a bit more of the latter.
First some demographics: white male in his “extremely early mid-50s” (nod to Martin Short) with no known co-morbidities, no immediate family members immunocompromised, my entire family was able to be fully vaccinated against SARS-CoV-2 as soon as vaccines became available (team Moderna.) We are very lucky in these regards.
I am a scientist and educator whose life goal is to help people better understand the natural world and their place within it. I’m also a long-time student of and advocate for evidence-based critical thinking – not contrarianism – but real and scholarly critical thinking. If there’s an opinion I’m sharing on some important matter, there’s a good chance I’ve done a fairly deep dive on the peer-reviewed literature associated with that subject and have looked for specific examples that might weaken the strength of evidence in one way or another.
So how have I personally managed my behavior during the COVID19 pandemic?
My objective is to not get COVID19. I don’t want seasonal influenza either and this is why I seek vaccination against it every year – who wants to lose a week of productivity feeling like you’ve been run over by a dump truck? So I don’t want COVID19. I’m confident that if I did I would survive the ordeal (although plenty of folks ostensibly healthier than I am have not), but I am loathe to serve as a potential vector for this virus. This is where emotion seeps into the equation for me: I refuse to be the source of an infection to someone else who might not be as robust in immunity and I refuse to help this $%&# virus spread death and destruction where it goes. Sorry pal, but I’m not enabling you.
Okay, but literally what am I doing? What are the benchmarks I’m looking for to adjust my behavior? Often on social media I’ll encounter people asking questions like “Is anyone still masking in public?” People are seeking guidance on day-to-day behaviors of others. So here’s what I, at least, do.
Personally, I want to know how much SARS-CoV-2 virus might be circulating in my community. That’s a combination of three things: What’s my “community”? Am I confident that we’re testing enough? How many active cases do we have right now?
My community includes the people with whom my family and are I likely to be interacting. In our university town of Stillwater, OK that’s likely a mixture of folks from 5 or 6 counties. So my city and my county might make sense as my community, but it’s a bigger pool of people than that. I also don’t want the hassle of aggregating data from multiple sources – assuming such data even are available. So to me it makes the most sense to simply look at data compiled for our state.
Are we testing enough? No way, and it’s not even close. Here on campus at Oklahoma State University, testing has never been compulsory, randomized, or regular. Those are the data I would want to have confidence we were tracking outbreaks well. As a result, there’s a huge bias in people seeking tests when they think they either have or have been exposed to a COVID19 infection. This means that our “percent positive” skews very high compared to other states and to where we need to be for assurance that the general infection rate among our population is low. All I can look to, therefore, is a level of testing that is outpacing the percent positives data. “Are we testing more people per 100,000 in population than we have active cases of COVID19 per 100,000 in population?” This is a horribly obtuse metric as a guide to behavior, but it’s the best we have available in our state.
The actual benchmark I’m looking for is a confident estimate that we’ve got <100 infections statewide/100,000 people. That would work out to a bit less than 4000 total, active infections statewide, in our state of just under 4 million in population. 1 in 100 with COVID = too risky. 1 in 10,000 = feeling confident playing those odds. 1 in 1000? That’s confidence eroded to the point at which I’m masking again.
[Note that if you don’t have such metrics readily compiled for you the formula is simple to calculate yourself: (number of cases/population) * 100,000. For example, the current number of active cases for the state of Oklahoma is 20,093. Our state’s population (2019 estimate) is 3,957,000: 20,093/3,957,000 = 0.00507784. That’s 508 cases per 100,000 people. Our current testing rate is 188/100,000 and 19.9% of those tests are positive for SARS-CoV-2.]
So how many cases? Okay so statewide, if we are testing at a higher rate than people are suffering infection… that’s only happened in 6 months out of the 19 since March 2020. Four of those 6 months were April–July 2020, during which time I was maximizing my isolation from any people outside our immediate family bubble and donning a cloth mask any time I went out in public. Cases were steadily growing during this time too, and by August 2020 the infection rate increased beyond the testing rate and did not fall below the testing rate until May 2021.
My family was vaccinated by April 2021, and by May 2021 we finally had data in keeping with my criterion of testing > infections. Our testing rate had dropped very low, down below 100 tests/100k people for the first time since April of 2020. But cases were lower still: 37/100k by the end of May 2021 and 50/100k by the end of June. By the end of June case counts were increasing again and by the end of July the trend had reversed as delta variant COVID19 swept through our majority unvaccinated state: July closed with 250 cases/100k while testing at just 74/100k.
When did I change my behavior? After 14 months of masking and avoiding people, May and June 2021 were glorious. We simply didn’t have much virus circulating in our state and, though testing rate was so low, cases were low enough that I had confidence that we could detect a new outbreak. I returned to my office for daily work, I started going to restaurants again, etc. I did these things mask-free. I usually kept a mask handy, but was out and about without wearing one.
When did my behavior change again? July 2021. By the beginning of July it was already clear that cases were steadily increasing and that delta COVID19 had been unleashed in Oklahoma. At some point in July, I started masking in public again. I’ll keep doing that until testing outpaces cases and I’ve got confidence that we’re consistently lower than 100 cases per 100,000.
by Sierra Williams, PhD and Mangum student program participant- SICB 2021
“Do you wish you had never gotten sick?” my mother asked me.
The question made me hesitate. My illness had destroyed my childhood and robbed me of my peace of mind. However, I wasn’t sure if I would be the same person sans illness. Would I have made the same choices? Would I still be studying immunology? Would I be in the STEM field at all? My disease had been a part of me for so long, trying to remember a time without it was like trying to remember a dream.
“Tribulation builds character,” I told her. I wasn’t sure if I believed it. “If I was offered a cure now, I would take it.” Taking a cure now wouldn’t erase the past ten years as a student with disabilities.
WordPress prompts one to “Add you thoughts here” when reblogging another post. My thoughts are that those tears are still flowing along that trail and we need to remove all honorifics from English common names of North American birds, as we should have done long ago.
When people say they are used to the current bird names that honor people of the past, that they like their historic or nostalgic value, or that the names don’t mean anything to them other than the bird, I get that. On a typical morning walk from my home in the Pacific Northwest, I tally Steller’s Jay, Hutton’s Vireo, and Bewick’s Wren on my smart phone eBird app without much thought. If you were to say to me “Lewis’s Woodpecker”, only that glorious glossy green and rose woodpecker with the handsome gray collar pops into my mind.
But there is one bird’s name that hits me in the gut, takes my breath away, because it’s personal: Scott’s Oriole.
This story has been picked up many times over the past few months, but not yet by me.
Thanks to sharp-eyed Scott Kruitbosch from the Connecticut Audubon Society, those of us who weren’t subscribers to Sports Illustrated back in 1955 now know that birding was a sport that once made the cover! Check out the story here.
By now, we’re all familiar with this image: Velociraptors running at high speed toward a big lumbering dinosaur that the little demons subdue with an onslaught of murderous slashes from an outsized claw on their second toe. Mark Stevenson’s reproduction below is a vivid attempt to bring one of these battles to life.
This model by artist Charlie McGrady illustrates the unique foot structure of this group of dinosaurs. The first toe has moved back, and toes 2, 3, and 4 point forward. It’s that second digit (the “inside toe”) that has been greatly enlarged to support that famous sickle-shaped claw that we’re now so used to seeing elevated when the animal runs and swiped down to cut a huge slash in attack mode.
That basic toe structure is represented in modern birds. In a perching bird’s anisodactyl foot, digit 1 is moved to the rear, while digits 2–4 face…
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