September 2019 — Lisa Sheppard wrote a piece describing some of our cryptic wetland bird playback and modeling work! The takeaway is that often we cannot collect enough occurrence data to include certain species in occupancy and detection models, and this is pervasive in the literature. Read about it here.
August 2019 — We had a large presence at the Illinois State Fair, where we taught ~200 children and their families about the perils of bird migration, native pollinator conservation, and alligator snapping turtle telemetry. Kids enjoyed finding pit tags with our pit tag reader, extracting beanie-baby bats out of mistnets, collecting temporary fish and heron tattoos, and creating their own insects. We would like to thank the Illinois Department of Natural Resources staff for planning Conservation World and hosting us for the first time this year.
September 2017 - present — For several years, I have volunteered with a tight-knit bird banding community at the Lincoln Land Bird Banding Laboratory in Springfield, IL. This banding station is run by Vernon Kleen during spring and fall migration, and by Tony Rothering during the MAPS breeding bird season. One of my favorite things about this banding station is that it is built on the campus of Lincoln Land Community College, where we teach visiting students and community members about migratory birds and the importance of long-term mark-recapture studies, often reaching out to groups with very little experience with birds.
February 2019 — I was blown away by the thousands of naturalists, artists, birders, and scientists that attended the 2019 Wild Things conference in Chicago. My collaborator Stephanie Beilke (Audubon Great Lakes) and I gave a talk about wetland bird conservation and ongoing eDNA research, and I was heartened by both the level of interest in research by the public and the diversity of this conference. Short, accessible, and affordable conferences like these are a fantastic way to talk to citizen scientists and interested people of all ages and backgrounds, make publicly funded research available to the public, and give space for the broader community to rally around science.