We would be remiss if we didn’t stop this week to remember the great artist and naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, inventor of the field mark, granddad of modern birding, born 100 years ago on Thursday.
Peterson’s centennial is being met with great fanfare, including a fancy new edition of the Peterson field guide, a lavish [...]
Here at Round Robin we’re gradually recovering from the scientific meeting overload that was mid-August – and we hope everyone else is too.
So what are we up to now? Working on creating a Flickr group that anyone can join to share bird photos. These can be photos you’re proud of, mystery photos, artsy photos, digiscoped [...]
Two weeks, 16 posts, and 6,000 words later, my 2008 meeting season is over. The ISBE conference ended for me at Steve Lima’s discussion of whether Norway rats can stay alert while they’re sleeping – “perhaps appropriate for the last talk of a very long meeting,” the session moderator noted.***
Biology meetings tend to be held [...]
The answer emerging from recent research seems to be a hearty ‘yes,’ qualified by a ‘but let’s not rush into things.’ This was the sentiment offered by Ken Otter, of the University of Northern British Columbia, as he described a two-year study of bird migrations at a proposed $500 milion, 170 megawatt wind-power plant.
Wind power [...]
4:30 p.m. I agree: Adelie Penguins just look adorably hopeless when they totter around on the snow. But don’t underestimate their tenacity – or their hiking skills, as Grant Ballard, of the Point Reyes Bird Observatory, showed today.
In March 2000, the world’s largest iceberg broke off the Ross Ice Shelf in Antarctica. It was larger [...]
3:00 p.m. Joel Heath, a recent Ph.D. from Simon Fraser University, spent his winters in Hudson Bay studying Common Eiders feeding in the few specks of open water that were left.
As if that wasn’t cold enough, he managed to record some amazing underwater video of eiders diving to the bottom, collecting mussels and urchins (which [...]
Most scientific meetings are so huge there’s no choice but to hold them deep in the bowels of some oversized hotel in some major city.
The ISBE meetings are a breath of fresh air. They’re taking place on Cornell’s campus, in the height of a glorious upstate New York summer. Walks to the meeting take you [...]
I’m just back from all that bird research in Portland, and now I’m at the International Society for Behavioral Ecology meetings back here at Cornell. Look for some more research tidbits later in the week.
But let’s get back to our redesign for a moment: Alex is in the middle of designing new pages for our [...]
5:45 p.m. The final talk has just ended, and the feeling rippling through the Portland Hilton Tower is not unlike the last day of eighth grade. Professors, postdocs, and grad students spill into the hallways, bumping into old friends they hadn’t run into yet, even though it’s the last day.
A tremendous burbling winds up the [...]
I’m a grudging admirer of cowbirds – the villainy of palming your kids off on other birds balances against the ingenious solutions to living a life of subterfuge and masquerade. But even I blanched when Peter Arcese confronted us with video evidence of so-called “nest farming” by cowbirds.
The video footage, collected by Phil Elliott of [...]
A blog from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
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