New Paper - The potential of semi-structured citizen science data as a supplement for conservation decision-making - Validating the performance of eBird against targeted avian monitoring efforts

Stuber, EF, Robinson, O, Bjerre, E, Otto, Mk, Millsap, B, Zimmerman, G, Brasher, MG, Ringelman, KM, Fournier, AMV, Yetter, A, Isola, JE, Ruiz-Gutierrez, V. 2022 The potential of semi-structured citizen science data as a supplement for conservation decision-making: Validating the performance of eBird against targeted avian monitoring efforts Biological Conservation 10.1016/j.biocon.2022.109556

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Resources on Unpaid Labor

The literature on unpaid work in ecology/STEM is growing, and I’ll try to keep this updated as a resource for folks who want to find all this great work.

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New peer reviewed publication Structured decision making and optimal bird monitoring in the northern Gulf of Mexico

Fournier, AMV, Wilson, RR, Lyons, JE, Gleason, JS, Adams, EM, Barnhill, LM, Brush, JM, Cooper, RJ, DeMaso, SJ, Driscoll, MJL, Eaton, MJ, Frederick, PC, Just, MG, Seymour, MA, Tirpak, JM, and Woodrey, MS, 2021 Structured decision making and optimal bird monitoring in the northern Gulf of Mexico U.S. Geological Survey Open-File Report 2020–1122, 62 p., https://doi.org/10.3133/ofr20201122.

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New co-authored paper out on translational ecology

Saunders, SP, Wu, JX, Adams, E, Bateman, B, Bayard, T, Beilke, S, Dayer, A, Fournier, AMV, Fox, K, Gow, EA, Heglund, P, Lerman, SB, Michel, NL, Paxton, E, CekercioAlu, AH, Smith, MA, Thogmartin, W, Woodrey, MS, van Riper, C. 2021 Bridging the research-implementation gap in avian conservation with translational ecology. Ornithological Applications (formerly The Condor) 10.1093/ornithapp/duab018

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10th Anniversary of Oil Coming Ashore from Deepwater Horizon

Prior to coming to Forbes last summer, I worked with the Gulf of Mexico Avian Monitoring Network (gomamn.org). GoMAMN came together after the Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill to better coordinate how we collect data about birds, so we’re better able to assess the impacts of restoration and management in the Gulf of Mexico, as well as the impact of one off events, such as oil spills and hurricanes.

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2020 BioOne Ambassador Award

I’m thrilled to be selected for the 2020 BioOne Ambassador Award, for my 2019 paper in Waterbirds, which presented the results of my three year wetland management experiment in Missouri examining the impacts of water level management during autumn migration on rails and waterfowl.

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My C.V. Without Twitter - 2020 Edition

This is an update to a previous post. Folks who see twitter as something full of cat videos and the president’s latest thoughts often laugh when I tell them that twitter has been incredibly valuable to me, starting as a grad student, and now as a professional scientist.

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Job Hunt Experience

This is the data on the job search that resulted in my postdoc at Mississippi State University from 2017-2019.

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Imposter Syndrome Resources

On Friday I am leading a discussion for the COAST Women in Science Group about imposter syndrome. The feeling that you are an imposter, and everything else knows what they are doing, but you are a fraud. Its a common feeling among many folks, across career fields, and stages. It can be really debilitating and discouraging, and we’re hoping have an open discussion about it will help everyone realize that they are not alone.

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My CV without Twitter

For many reasons the past few months I’ve been feeling especially grateful for the wonderful people who are apart of my work and life because I am active on twitter. Folks who see twitter as something full of cat videos and the president’s latest thoughts often laugh at this, but science twitter is a powerful community, that has supported me in many small and huge ways over the past 5 years.

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Reflections on runconf18

Last week I had the great privilege to attend ROpenSci’s unconf. Having typically been in work situations where I was the only or primary R user, I was excited and nervous to attend my first R related event. I’ve been involved with the larger R community for several years, through The Carpentries, reviewing packages for ROpenSci, and through several package specific groups, but a chance to spend two days with my email closed, working on something new in R with many people who I’ve ‘known’ for years via twitter was fantastic. In addition ROpenSci worked diligently to ensure that unconf was a welcoming and inclusive place for everyone, from a clear and emphasized Code of Conduct, to ice breakers that helped start conversations among participants, to accommodating everyone’s dietary needs, and ensuring things like lactation rooms were available really made it clear that each participant was valued.

The unconf focuses on two days of community driven development, which can include new features of existing packages, lesson development, new packages and many other things. I spent my first day with the education group, talking about the opportunities and challenges of teaching R in a formal education setting. It was great to share experiences across disciplines [history, ecology, bioinformatics] and see that many of the struggles we as educators face are common across these disciplines. Our group’s goal is to form a community of educators in R who can share their materials more cohesively. More details on how the group outlined that sharing can be found here.

Day 2 I jumped in with the metadata group, who was working on the dataspice package. dataspice takes your raw data, and creates the spice on top of it, the metadata, which is so important for communicating with yourself in the future, as well as any others who may want to use your data. Creating metadata is often a hurdle to many data users/creators, and dataspice creates template metadata files based on a datafile input, and also has several shiny apps to help the user in populating those templates, which the package then turns into JSON, and if the userdesires a simple website about the dataset. Our hope is to make creating metadata more accessible to everyone!

Beyond being apart of the education and metadata groups, the conference was an amazing chance to meet many of my fellow R-Ladies, including some members of R-Ladies Remote. The ice breaker on the first day, where we grouped ourselves across a continum based on questions like ‘I know what my role in the R community is’ started some great conversations with folks, like myself, who are still not clear on what our role is. After unconf I feel more confident in my role and more confident in being involved and contributing to the parts of the community I belong to in the future.

ROpensci accepts applications to attend unconf each year in February and whether you are a R developer, or a post doc like me who teahes sometimes, and uses a lot of R packages, I encourage you to apply to attend, its a great way to learn, about R and the community as a whole.

Huge thanks to the ROpenSci team for their great effort in planning this amazing event and ensuring that everyone was welcome and able to participate to their fullest. You can see all the diverse and amazing things to come out of unconf18 here

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Automated Tweeting

I’m part of the team behind the Wilson Ornithological Society twitter account. My main job is tweeting about the new articles in the Wilson Journal of Ornithology every time a new issue comes out (so 4 times a year). I’v been doing this since last summer, going into tweetdeck, and scheduling each tweet by hand, a process that takes several hours to do, since I want to tweet about each paper several times over the first week they are out, and make sure I hit a variety of time zones.

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2018 Goals

Continue to fight against injustice in all forms, stay informed, voice my opinion to those who represent me in government

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Seminar at University of Montreal

Huge thanks to Timothée Poisot and the entire Poisot lab for hosting me in late November. It was wonderful to get to share my work with everyone in an seminar and then visiting with folks over several days. Montreal is a beautiful and fun city, and I loved finally getting to try Poutine!

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New Article in Missouri Conservationist

As a long time fan of the Missouri Conservationist, the magazine produced by Missouri Department of Conservation, it is a real treat to see my work on the cover. I wrote a cover story article with Doreen Mengel and Lisa Webb detailing the rail work that has been going on during spring and autumn migration in Missouri the past 5 years.

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Birds and Breakfast Video

This past spring Arkansas State Parks came and recorded one of my Birds and Breakfast programs at Hobbs State Park. This program was one of the highlights of my PhD and I’m so tickled to have a video to remember all the kids and adults smiling faces while showing them their backyard birds.

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Elusive Migration Talk Notes

Last year for the Ohio Ornithological Society and this year for The Biggest Week in American Birding I’m giving a keynote talk entited “Elusive Migration: The Migration Ecology of Rails”

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WOS17 Presentation

I just returned from Fort Meyers, FL where I was attending the 98th Meeting of the Wilson Ornithological Society and presenting on one of my dissertation chapters.

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Passed My Defense

I am thrilled to announce that I succesfully passed my PhD Defense last Friday, now I just need to address a few edits from my committee and my dissertation and PhD will be complete.

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How I stay organized

I’ve had this conversation with several people over the past few weeks, so like most things I talk to people frequently about I figured it was a good idea to write it up.

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Visualizing Migration - Synthesizing Different Datasets

One of the challenges of working with rails is we know so little about them, and what we do know is often scattered in small data points here from the 1960s, and here from the 2000s. There is little data that has been collected in a deliberate way over a long period. The first place I looked was The Birds of North America, which provides detailed species accounts for each species. These graphs showed me some data, with literal question marks on it, that didn’t provide a lot of guidance as to when Virginia Rails were migrating (Conway 1995)

As a result of these fairly uninformative graphs I often end up digging into some literature to find data. Over the past two years I’ve tracked down almost all the issues of The Bluebird, journal of the Audubon Society of Missouri, and compiled all the spring and autumn migration data contained therein Data available here on figshare. These data are opportunistic at best (someone saw a rail, and decided to report it) but when looking at pre-eBird times (eBird being a very large online database of citizen science bird observations, which really took over after 2000) these kind of state by state resources can be vital.

I targeted Missouri because that is where my own field work takes place and I was seeking data to compare to my own. In five years and over 1000 hours of surveys I hadn’t seen very many Yellow or Virginia Rails (<100 in each case). This made quantifying their migration difficult especially because I am assuming some level of year to year variability in migration, which is common among birds.

So I sought out this other data, from the state Audubon Society. I also downloaded all August-November eBird.org observations for Missouri, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky and Ohio (roughly the same latitude as Missouri and within the same adminsitrative flyway). These represent another type of opportunistic data, where members of the public go out birding, record what they see, and submit their observations. More data points were available here but eBird data can be biased because people tend to bird where they live, meaning effort is not evenly distributed across the landscape. So I sought out a third type of data, building strikes.

When I tell people rails hit buildings they are often surprised, but many many bird species have been recorded striking buildings. Many species of birds migrate at night and the lights on tall structures in large cities (and even in less urban situations) can disorient them and lead to collisions. In many large cities there are building strike monitoring programs where people walk the same route each morning and record what is found on the sidewalk (in many cases the dead birds are also collected and given to a museum, YAH MUSEUMS!). These data could be another interesting source since they are being collected each day in the same place, though this is only occurring in large cities. I obtained these data points from Loss et al (2014), Thanks Scott!

So I have these three kinds of data, and my own data, and I want to figure out what on earth they can tell me about the migration of two of the least studied birds in North America.

I thought about doing this a few different ways, first trying histograms, and line graphs, even scatter plots. None of these seemed to work. All the sample sizes were different and whatever the story was it was lost.

Then I tried box plots, with the idea this would help take out the highly variable y axis due to different sample sizes, and allow us to compare the duration and median date of migration.

This was ok. I only had one data point for building strikes of Yellow Rails, so I excluded it, and this figure is fine. But I wasn’t really happy with it, I was still wrestling back and forth with if I should be describing each data type on its own, or if they should all be lumped together, and I found this graph deceptive, it did a good job of making it clearer because the sample size was hidden, but that hidden element bugged me.

Data Type Yellow Rail Virginia Rail Citation
The Bluebird 20 20 (Fournier 2016)
eBird 53 261 (Sullivan et al. 2009)
Building Strikes 1 3 (Loss et al. 2014)
My Surveys 77 114 Fournier et al. Unpublished Data

So I tried some other methods, again and again.

Finally I settled on this one.

This graph does a few things I really like. It separates out the Birds of North America data, which isn’t really data so much as my visualization of the information on the graph in the Birds of North American Accounts. It also lumps the data in a way I am comfortable with. All the data I gathered from other sources, Audubon Society of Missouri, eBird and the building strike data, are lumped into ‘Opportunistic Observations’ which I think is the most conservative way of looking at them. My data, which were collected through nightly regular surveys are separated for two main reasons 1) they are my data and I wanted to compare my data to other data, 2) they were collected under one standardized protocol, unlike the other data types.

I think this data does a better job of showing the story. Yellow Rail migration, in my study and in the opportunistic data is occurring in two strong peaks which are near each other. Why they aren’t the same could be related to a variety of biases and assumptions in the data set. These also overlap well with the Birds of North America account range though they start earlier, which could be a big deal.

Virginia Rail migration is clearly a different beast. Opportunistic observations have two peaks, one of which strongly overlaps with my data, and migration is starting earlier and continuing much later than it does in the Birds of North America Account.

One thing I don’t like about this figure is I don’t have a good way of showing the yearly variation in the data, which is probably asking too much of what is still a pretty limited data set, but a ornithologist can dream!

I’m still working on this manuscript, and still trying to decide if this is the best way to visualize this kind of data. If you have ideas I’d love to hear them, aurielfournier@gmail.com or @RallidaeRule.

Citations

Conway, Courtney J. (1995). Virginia Rail (Rallus limicola), The Birds of North America (P. G. Rodewald, Ed.). Ithaca: Cornell Lab of Ornithology; Retrieved from the Birds of North America: https://birdsna.org/Species-Account/bna/species/virrai DOI: 10.2173/bna.173

Fournier, Auriel (2016): The Bluebird Rail Data. figshare. https://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2760913.v2 Retrieved: 21 50, Dec 05, 2016 (GMT)

Loss, S. R. S. S., T. Will, P. P. Marra, S. R. S. S. Loss, and P. P. Marra. 2014. Bird–building collisions in the United States: Estimates of annual mortality and species vulnerability. Condor 116:8–23. http://www.bioone.org/doi/abs/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1%5Cnhttp://dx.doi.org/10.1650/CONDOR-13-090.1.

Sullivan, B. L., C. L. Wood, M. J. Iliff, R. E. Bonney, D. Fink, and S. Kelling. 2009. eBird: A Citizen-based Bird Observation Network in the Biological Sciences. Biological Conservation 142:2282–2292.

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Twitter for Scientists Workshop at NAOC

Rebecca Heiseman, Beth Ross, Desiree Narango, Jordan Rutter and myself did a short workshop at the North American Ornithological Conference Tuesday, highlighting the many ways twitter can be used by scientists.

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Materials from NAOC 2016 Advanced R Workshop

Building off the success of the workshop Matt Boone and I taught at AOU in 2015 I taught a full day R workshop on programming, functions, data management and how to build an R package at the North American Ornithological Conference this year. Had 60+ participants and everyone learned a ton. Hoping to tweak it again, improve it some more and teach it again at AOU in 2017.

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SWS 2016 Presentation - Habitat Use of Sora During Autumn Migration

Just returned from a great meeting in Corpus Christi, Texas and the annual meeting of the Society of Wetland Scientists. I’ve never been to SWS before and it was a wonderful and informative meeting and great chance to break out of my often very bird focused bubble and think about wetlands in some new ways.

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How I got here

There are pictures of me geeking out about birds since I was quite small. Those who knew me even in passing as a kid are unsurprised where I ended up. I have been incredibly fortunate along the way to be guided mentored and at time shoved by some very key people in my life.

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Historic Women in Ornithology Reading Project

Sometime around American Thanksgiving I was asked on Twitter to recommend a few historic women in ornithology for someone’s kid to research for a school paper. I sat there, stared at my screen and then hung my head.

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Tips for tweeting from @RealScientists and @Biotweeps

Last fall I tweeted from @RealScientists and @BioTweeps as part of the outreach for my fall field work (#MORails). I choose to do this during my field work since live tweeting rail captures is WAY more exciting then live tweeting running R code or writing which is what I do the other 9 months of the year.

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Biometry TA Spring 2016

I’m already into my second week as the Teaching Assistant for the Undergrad/Graduate Biometry course here at UA. I am really excited to be teaching again this semester (I always forget how much I enjoy it) and doubly so since I get to teach people about R. I’m working on moving all the course materials over from systat to R, since this is the first time its being taught in R. If you are curious what we cover check out the repo.

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MORails Storify

Here are the best photos and tweets of the 2015 #MORails season. https://storify.com/amv_fournier/morails-2015

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/#MORails 2015 Field Season By the Numbers

72 nights
10 sites
30 treatment wetlands
10,700 miles driven in the truck
~1200 miles driven on ATV
169 hours of surveying
1063 Sora (don’t do the math for miles/dollar per Sora, just don’t)
7 Virginia rails
12 Yellow rails
62 rails captured (3 Virginia, 5 Yellow, 54 Sora)
62 sets of feathers gathered for migratory connectivity research (these will be combined with feathers from previous years, the 60 from Canada this summer and hunter feathers from all over the central US!!!)
120 hours of nighttime go pro video footage (videos will be posted once I get time to process them)
5 fouled spark plugs
3 carburetors cleaned
2 spotlights held together with electrical tape and hope
1 new air filter
5 oil changes on ATVs
1 flat tire (ON THE FIRST DAY)
5 seasons of Breaking Bad watched
+/- 1000 cups of tea and coffee consumed

0 times running out of gas on the ATVS
0 times losing wallets
0 times putting ATVs into way to deep water
0 King Rails (sadly)
0 Black Rails (still not sure they exist….)

many hours sprawled out in random parking lots trying to figure out what was wrong with the atvs
many hours of laughing and brownies and cooking together

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Advice to my first year graduate student self

In response to a request from a friend who is just starting her PhD, here is what I wish I could tell my first year PhD Student self, and what advice I can give to other graduate student Women in STEM. This was written during the first week of my field season, so the thoughts are short, but I am happy to discuss them more if folks have questions or comments.

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Field Season 2015

Monday August 10th begins my fourth field season. Just saying that makes me pause, I’m a fourth year PhD Student, a PhD Candidate, man time has flown.

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Presentation at AOU/COS 2015 Meeting

I gave a presentation at the American Ornithologists Union/Cooper Ornithological Society meeting in Norman, OK this past week highlighting some work that I started in my undergraduate and which I hope to soon have accepted for publication.

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How to Apply for a Field Job

I’ve been on both sides of the problem for several years now. I spent years applying for field technician positions, interviewing, and snagging a few, now I just finished hiring for my fourth field season of my PhD fieldwork. I’m something of a questioner, I’m always asking people for their thoughts on how to do things, and I’ve picked many brains about how to apply for field jobs and here are my take aways, for those who are coming up in the ranks.

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Planning your field work? Have you thought about safety?

This post was originally peeked by a thread on reddit about lab safety horror stories, and is in fact horrifying. My experience lies in a different realm, field work, where safety is often also a big issue, though the guidelines around it are often missing, or totally ignored. I chatted very briefly with a few folks about this on twitter a week or so ago and my initial wanting to write this post was dampened by the realization that like the reddit post, this may spark a string of ‘oh you did that dangerous thing, mine was so much more dangerous’ and further fuel the masochistic dangerous mindset that often hangs over fieldwork and is very alienating to many, and dangerous for everyone.

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Software Carpentry Workshop Wrapup

In March I coordinated a Software Carpentry workshop here at the University of Arkansas. We did a two-day workshop on R, the Unix Shell and Git and it was very well received. A few people have asked me to write up my thoughts on planning the workshop, the workshop itself, etc, so here it goes.

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Why I love what I study

I originally wanted to call this ‘why I love birds’ but I realized that my urge to write this comes not really from my love of all things with feathers, but from my passion for what I do, and the sadness I sometimes feel when others try to tell me my passion is bad, or don’t have passion of their own towards their own science.

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MORails 2014 Wrapup

Every year of fieldwork I do seems like an additional argument for Murphy’s Law and Long-Term Research. No two years are alike, and this year was the year of thunderstorms and rain. 2012 was a drought and 2013 was drought-like (it rained earlier in the year, but not much during the season). Despite the weather’s best efforts we were able to get in all the surveys we needed to complete and picked up on some weird patterns along the way. This year had no clear peak in migration (unlike the previous two field seasons) though we saw essentially the same number of birds, they just came through at a more steady rate throughout the year.

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MORails 2014 round 1

Each season of my project is broken down into four rounds of surveys. We visit each region of the state four times and we’ve just finished up our first set of visits to each region.

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\#Studyingforcomps - Carving Out Time

My comps are coming up fast (8 days!!) and the end of the semester is finally past, FINALLY. The past two months have been a bit of a wake up call about how I need to take care of myself as well as my work. In the spirit of taking care of myself, I’m carving out a few minutes to breathe and share a bit more of my comps process.

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\#studyingforcomps - focus techniques

Staying focused is hard, being productive perhaps even more challenging. In grad school the challenge of focus is especially true because there are SO many things pulling for your attention. Your research, your classes, any teaching you do, writing grants, writing papers, presenting at conferences, and all the other tasks. It makes it easy to be very busy without actually doing anything.

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\#studyingforcomps the moment of discovery

Science is all about discovering new things, whether its information new to humanity as a whole or just to yourself. The moment of discovery is what drives many of us in science. As I’m studying for my comprehensive exams I am having a lot of these moments. Things are clicking together. I am forming connections between papers and ideas which had never occurred to me before. Constant discovery is what makes all my studying so addictive, even when it takes me two hours to get through a paper because I’m going to Google every other paragraph for another explanation.

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Passion in Science - Childish behavior or science rocketfuel?

A few weeks back I had a series of conversations with some other scientists who decided to tell me different variations of ‘birds aren’t important’ ‘people who work on birds lack creativity’ ‘you aren’t as good of a scientists because you work on a charismatic animal’.

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I Love Science Because

I love science because the idea a bird can FLY from continent to continent twice a year and come back to the same place, amazes me. I love things with wings, with feathers, with elaborate songs and displays. I love birds, and I have since I was young, (granted I still am, so lets just say, younger). I love how many different ways there are to move from place to place throughout the year. So many different strategies and ideas. I love the fact that migration has captured the human imagination for millenia and connects people across languages and cultures.

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Grad School - HOW?!?

So now that I’ve managed to get into graduate school and am having a pretty good time thus far I’ve been getting lots of questions on what method I used to go about getting the position I did. This is a complex question, there is a lot that you need to do and think about and just about as many ideas on how to go about it. But since I keep getting asked here is my take, what I did, and what I’ve been told can help you along the way. Keep in mind, I’m still in my first year, so while I was successful in getting in only time will tell if I end up successful all the way around.

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