I love this. Thank you to the ebird folks @birdsoftheworld.bsky.social

I can do better

Of course my real life bestie/fiancé is also my birding bestie

Gotta work on uploading recordings

Yard birding beating patch birding was a surprise here. Also damn I basically birded from DC to Massachusetts

Solid amount of hours too

Always good to get more checklists than days

EBIRD WRAPPED IS OUT #Ornithology #birding

When you see that mega-rarity

In the early stages of planning another field season in Borneo and it really had me missing the birds.

This is a Blue-headed Pitta from my last time there. It’s my absolute favorite bird. How could a bird possibly be so round and colorful??

Months of work in the lab and ~60 samples all resulting in less than a drop of liquid. Ridiculous. Cant wait to get our sequences for Bornean Birds!

Hi folks! I thought I should do an intro post with the growing community on here

I’m a PhD student at George Mason University studying mechanisms for avian responses to forest degradation in #Borneo. I love #birding, #ornithology, #genetics, #rstats, and collaborating, get in touch!

🌎

Fall bird banding doesn’t get much better than this.

Thanks to Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute for letting us host a GMU wildlife society bird banding demo! #ornithology

Then, I tested which species characteristics caused birds to end up offshore more often. I found that species vagrancy likelihood was higher in birds with a longer migration distance and rounded wings, but the relationship was weaker in birds with pointed wings.

I modeled which external factors predict offshore vagrancy. It appears that vagrants are most common in the fall, but in spring, strong winds cause sporadic pulses of birds. Birds are also more common offshore during greater amounts of on land migration.

Almost ten years later, I revisited the question as a side project during my PhD. I downloaded eBird data for common migrant land birds in the western US and selected observations from offshore vessels. From this, I verified their claim that cowbirds were the most common!

Thanks to the @ababirds.bsky.social podcast for featuring my research! It is a great show, and I highly recommend everyone listen to it.

I figured now was a good time to highlight my passion project on the unstudied mystery of why land birds get lost over the ocean

doi.org/10.1186/s404...