@skwinnicki
Evolutionary ecologist & ornithologist, postdoc Ohio State | PhD UIUC, MSc Kansas State | SciComm, birding, and nature photography | certified Lawn Hater, Cowbird Apologist, Stress Physiology Enthusiast, Typo Lover | they/them 🏳️⚧️🏳️🌈 | skwinnicki.com
Working from home had me thinking "wow, I really thought home internet had gotten way better than this in the last decade"
took me a bit to realize that was probably because I'd spent most of those years living with an online gamer who bought the internet speeds you need for that
I forget how far north you are sometimes haha, my first thought was "what are you talking about, we all have cranes year-round"
Last year I got every warbler species possible (reported in Ohio almost every year) except for Kirtland's and Orange-crowned, so I thought I'd make my life easier by getting an overwintering one this year.
Pretty silly to get a Swainson's in Ohio but not the Orange-crowned that spent months here
For months I've told myself I'd get to the local park where an Orange-crowned Warbler has been coming to the feeders all winter and I finally made plans to do that this weekend, so it'll be really funny if that's one bird heading north right now
birdcast map of live bird migration on 6 March 2026 at 17:30 eastern, showing a heat map of birds detected by active radar stations. The colors are still very dim blue and purple, for low migration, but that's 13.8 million birds in flight over Texas and the Mississippi flyway, including Ohio but especially the gulf coast.
Heard some songbird flight calls as I walking my dog just now and told myself I was imagining it because the 76F/24C weather today was making me dream of late April (there were 3 inches of snow on the ground on Monday)
but Birdcast estimates we've got 13.8M migrating birds up right now
not even the core villain and somehow they took the biggest brunt of this hyena hit piece
(sorry hyena researchers)
This looks like it’s a very joyously noisy yard!
perhaps if I just added another 20 pounds it would crush the anxiety out of me and let me sleep enough to be functional
As life around here gets more dangerous for queer people, just know that if something terrible happens to me it wasn't self-inflicted, no matter what the authorities say
unless the authorities are saying that I was crushed beneath the weight of a bunch of weighted blankets, that'd be true
New invention idea: a human body that can withstand the weight of even more weighted blankets
Oh that's extremely cool! Yeah pigment-free life would be impossible for photosynthesizers, I guess
They give me a lot of practice!
I guess I am! Bird specimens are typically easy (albeit almost always illegal to have, I mean easy in a "prep for museum" context) but preparing aquatic animals is so challenging for me to comprehend spnhc.org/ichthyology-...
it is never very high-quality stuff haha
but putting videos on YouTube for free is the cheapest option for storing wildlife clips
Did you know that research in late 2025 showed that over 20% of the videos suggested by YouTube to a new user were AI slop?
I used to only post my best wildlife clips on YouTube but fuck it, low-quality footage from me is still better than low-quality fake footage
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bjd1...
In case y'all missed this important addition to this thread: bsky.app/profile/gwen...
I'm not sure, to be honest, the fish people took it and that's the last step for which I was involved.
Yesss I love stuff like this.
We need a better memorial to supplement this one in town: bsky.app/profile/skwi...
not an insignificant part of why "standalone mini-freezer" made it onto my wedding registry a few years later (that and the many dead birds that have stopped by my personal freezers en route to university collections over the years). That's one appliance I kept in the divorce, my corpse freezer
photo of a large dead armored catfish, a foot-long thick gray fish covered in scales like armor, laying next to a sidewalk along a road, where water had recently been sitting. It is not a native fish, so perhaps a discarded former pet.
the fish was too big for a gallon-sized freezer bag, so for years everything in my freezer had a slight taste of "big dead catfish wrapped in layers of plastic shopping bags"
It eventually made it to the university collection once we were back in the office
Anyway, it allowed us more time for that brief window of covid community whimsy. So much sidewalk art, distanced chats with neighbors, community care, strange stuff.
Once I found a large fish on the road, tweeted about it, a prof saw the tweet, had me collect it, kept it in my freezer for years.
UIUC stayed locked down way longer than most US institutions-- we had PCR testing tents and were required to have weekly negative covid tests to enter school buildings for literally years. We had backyard outdoor parties that required negative tests for admittance.
I so appreciated that.
who among us doesn't want to throw our whole selves into a big vat of curry
Getting there, thanks! Gotta keep care of the big fussy organ haha
Also, sorry, I'll check my DMs when I can (I only have one device that is still running the old version of Bluesky, and I'm locked out of my DMs on all other devices because I refuse to comply with the Ohio law saying I need to submit my legal ID to use DMs)
It's Blacklick Woods, the Buttonbrush trail that is in-between the nature center and the canopy trail (the first main pool you can get to from the nature center). If you see sunglasses in there please grab them, they're mine and I'm waiting for the water to recede (dropped them on salamander night)
oh yeah $10 isn't that bad at all! as long as you don't count the medical bills for whatever you catch
I once assumed one was dead when I saw a tail sticking out of a campus trash can, but it was actually inside a discarded pizza box, just so lost in the sauce (literally) that I could've grabbed it which my bare hands
In a few places! In NW Ohio: Oberlin college campus. In Central Ohio: Columbus suburbs and parks (Victorian Village, Goodale Park, McCorkle Park, Blacklick Woods, Westerville). In Dayton area: Oakwood, Kettering, Oregon, Beavercreek, Centerville, Xenia (supposedly, I've never looked there).