Outreach

February 2024 - The McHenry County Forest Preserve district invited me to speak for a second time at Research Roundup! The Research Roundup audience is a mix of scientists, managers, and laypeople. I presented ongoing research on Marsh and Sedge Wren blood metabolites, and discussed how patterns of apparent food limitation change with droughted conditions and breeding success.

January 2024 - I gave an invited talk to the Cook County Forest Preserve district, discussing ongoing research into how temperature and precipitation drive oak mast seeding for four oak species in the Chicagoland region. Additionally, I spoke about an ongoing collaboration with Dr. Jalene LaMontagne and her graduate student Addy Yoder, which links acorn counts to Red-headed Woodpecker occupancy and abundances in Cook and Lake County forest preserves.

February 2023 - The McHenry County Forest Preserve district kindly invited me to speak at their Research Roundup, which was the first one held by McHenry County since 2020. I presented on my recent Marsh and Sedge Wren research, and I hope to present again next year! We are hiring an avian field technician to assist with this work in 2024 from spring through fall (start/end dates flexible). Link to job description here: https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/7426/804803125

September 2022 - The Illinois News Bureau kindly wrote up a piece about our collaborative research with Audubon and Audubon Great Lakes - our new study in Ecosphere shows that wetland birds are using Chicagoland wetlands, despite the heavy surrounding urbanization. Check it out here! Link to our open-source paper here.

November 2021 - The Chicago Birder released our 2021 summary for spring and summer bird banding at Big Marsh! You can email me for the full scoop, and can view the mid-season blogpost here. Bird banding at Big Marsh is part of a larger series of research and outreach initiatives at Calumet. Read more about Calumet projects and volunteer here.

October 2020 - The University of Illinois News Bureau published a "Behind the Scenes" research news piece looking back to that magical time I found a King Rail in Volo Bog. You can read about it here. 

September 2020 - The Chicago Ornithological Society released our second blog post looking back on what it was like to band birds during a pandemic. We also report our banding totals by species. Take a look here!

August 2020 - Our Chicago Ornithological Society post is up! Click here to read a little bit about the history of Calumet and what we hope to find from banding birds at our new MAPS station.  

August 2020 - Our MAPS bird banding station in Chicago, #BigMarshMAPS, made it on the news! One of our most common species captured were Yellow Warblers, pictured here. Check out Stephanie Beilke's interview by Patty Wetli of WTTW and look for our upcoming posts for the Chicago Ornithological Society and Friends of Big Marsh.

September 2019 - Lisa Sheppard wrote a piece describing some of our cryptic wetland bird playback and modeling work! The takeaway is that often we can't collect enough occurrence data to include certain bird species in occupancy and detection models, and this problem is pervasive in the literature. Using eDNA might help. Read more here.

August 2019 - Our laboratory group taught ~200(!) children and their families about the perils of bird migration, native pollinator conservation, and alligator snapping turtle telemetry at the Illinois State Fair. Kids extracted beanie-baby bats out of mistnets, collected temporary heron tattoos, and created their own insects. We thank the Illinois Department of Natural Resources staff for planning Conservation World and hosting us for the first time this year!

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 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 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.