Ok, I’ll start off this new opening of the thread in science-y mode by attaching a link to a recent paper of mine on snowy owls. You’ll need to click on the pdf link on the webpage yourself for a copy, but the journal is open access so hopefully it works OK…
Anyways, I’m following this one up with some work on migration routes of snowies in relation to landscape features. If you’re not into all the boring stats in the paper 
, you may still appreciate the visuals in the figures that show the annual movement tracks of the owls into the high Arctic where they breed. These birds amaze me!
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Wow. That more than maybe reflects a lot of watching and waiting? And hiking.
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Well…a lot of driving around the backroads of Saskatchewan in winter at -30 C to trap and tag the owls. And yeah, I was out with a few grad students then doing behavioural observations for their own thesis topics and at times we froze our butts off. But other times, you sit in the cab of the truck with a thermos of hot coffee, waiting for the owls to do something.
Once the transmitters are on, the cool thing is that they download GPS locations via cell phone towers. So one can just track the positions of owls from the warmth of indoors, by looking at a computer screen. Lazy fieldwork then!
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Nice.
Okay, well, for science stuff I’ve done since I posted on this thread last, I’ve actually published an identification guide on the Waccamaw Formation mollusks. I think I’m up to about 50 copies having been sold or given away. I also now have a 2.5 page erratum/addendum for it…
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This is the last thing I’ve worked (and worked, and worked) on that has produced output: Malaria surveillance reveals parasite relatedness, signatures of selection, and correlates of transmission across Senegal - PMC
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Thanks. I greatly appreciate anything to do with malaria. I have flashbacks of cerebral malaria on the wards with kids, and a hematocrit of 4 (normal being about 40), etc–in those who survived!.
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