Tough Little Birds

To identify the species, sex, and age of a bird, a bird bander in North America relies either on personal experience with the species or on the massive handbook of bird descriptions known as the ...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2021/06/18/two-birds-in-the-hand-is-worth-1000-words/

One of the many fun things about bird banding is that you never know who you’ll catch next: every bird is a surprise. To try to share that feeling, I’m running brief profiles of selected bird...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2021/05/25/meet-some-birds-in-notes-from-the-station/

Facebird. Instagrebe. Tikstork. Linkedpenguin. Twitter. Only one of these is real, and I’m pretty sure that even on Twitter the number of actual birds participating is negligible. Birds do have...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2021/04/18/bird-social-networks/

It’s been… 20 months (yikes) since my last post, and some stuff has changed! I’m back in the San Francisco Bay Area where the juncos look right – none of this slate-colored nonsense – a...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2021/04/05/oh-hey-i-run-a-bird-banding-station-now/

When people want a different perspective on the world, they may go to the mountains, or the ocean, or admire the endlessness of the night sky. Landscapes so vast as to approach incomprehensibilit...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2019/08/17/small/

If a magical being pops into existence in front of you and demands that you choose a non-human animal into which you will be reincarnated, one of the first things you should consider is: how many...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2019/06/08/tough-little-frogs/

Frog season is upon us, and for us in the Frog Lab, regular sleeping hours are a luxury of the past. In the day we hide from the sun in basements and prepare our equipment. In the night, we don �...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2019/05/21/frog-season/

Recently I flew from a particularly dire version of Minnesota winter—periodic rain making no dent in the graying heaps of snow, while rendering the smooth ice-covered sidewalks puddle-pocked an...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2019/03/20/the-space-for-time-substitution/

If any animal ought to be able to expect a safely uneventful life, it’s the compact, guinea-pig-adjacent tuco-tuco. These South American rodents live in burrows underground, popping up into the...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2019/03/07/can-tuco-tucos-survive-a-volcanic-eruption/

The early stages of a scientific career are designed to be unstable, slingshotting you from place to place as you acquire new skills. I bucked this paradigm somewhat in the first years after fini...

https://toughlittlebirds.com/2018/12/20/new-state-new-science-and-some-old-science-too/