Great interview with Audubon's CEO Elizabeth Gray about how we're harnessing AI for bird conservation, highlighting our project (led by Jorge Velásquez) using bioacoustics and AI to monitor Conserva Aves reserves across Latin America wpintelligence.washingtonpost.com/topics/ai-te...
This is an excellent article on tropical bird declines even within large intact reserves. It’s great to see this research highlighted and I hope it’s able to continue! www.science.org/content/arti...
I'm excited to share that for the first time in its 126 year history, Christmas Bird Count population trends are now available for Latin America and the Caribbean! Ten-year trends (2013-2023) are available for ~50 species across nearly 20 countries. Check them out: www.audubon.org/community-sc...
A little girl in Portland, OR after being tear gassed by ICE. what the actual fuck.
Federal paramilitaries running up on the rooftops to fire irritants and flash bangs down into a peaceable assembly full of little kids
Final thoughts on a tale of two protests #Pretti #Portland #ICEOut #Teargas
A mother and their 15 year old describe getting gassed and seeing young children in pain. #Portland #ICEOut #Pretti
Today I saw ICE gas little white kids in the streets of Portland with chemical weapons. Imagine what they're doing to brown and black kids in the detention camps
Un-freaking-believable. I was at this rally and it was a planned and permitted rally and march organized by unions, accompanied by PPB, and full of kids, dogs and elderly. Why the hell is ICE gassing kids?!!
The U.S. government has lost more than 10,000 STEM Ph.D.s since Trump took office.
A Science analysis reveals how many were fired, retired, or quit across 14 agencies. Read more: https://scim.ag/4boPkq8
Well, Kristen Radtke of The Verge just made me cry with this remembrance of her childhood best friend Alex Pretti.
"Alex was an easy playmate: generous, curious, sweet. His mother always ensured he had a tidy haircut and a clean room."
www.theverge.com/policy/86856...
As always we had a productive and fun meeting reviewing our progress to date and planning the exciting new steps to come! As a bonus we spent a beautiful morning with Black Skimmers on the MS coast!
We wrapped up another successful team meeting for the NOAA RESTORE-funded Western Gulf Stewardship Task Force project. I couldn’t be more proud to lead such a wonderful team of scientists (ecological and social) and resource managers.
This support, and our partnerships with WildMon and Justin Kitzes’ lab at the University of Pittsburgh, will also help us build the acoustic monitoring infrastructure we need to transform how we monitor birds. These are exciting times in this field and I’m proud to be a part of it!
These funds will be used to expand the efforts @jivelasquezt.bsky.social is leading through Conserva Aves to develop community based acoustic monitoring of reserves in Colombia and elsewhere in South America.
I’m excited to share that we were one of 15 recipients of the Bezos Earth Fund AI Grand Challenge grants. These funds will be used to expand Audubon Latin America & Caribbean’s Conserva Aves program. www.bezosearthfund.org/news-and-ins...
Not one but two quantitative ecologist openings at the Alberta Biodiversity Monitoring Institute. This team is doing great work, if you're interested in avian ecology and biodiversity conservation and have a quantitative bent go check them out! abmi.ca/abmi-home/co...
I found this a really illuminating thread on what demonstrations do and why they matter.
An essay explores how two things can be true at once: The climate system is impossibly chaotic and climate change is simply true. By Joseph Howlett
www.quantamagazine.org/the-climate-...
It was great to speak with Christina Kelso at the NYT about the threats fireworks pose to coastal birds. This year, consider skipping the fireworks and celebrate in ways that are safer for birds and people too! www.nytimes.com/2025/07/04/c...
Lots of stuff getting tossed from this bill but as far as I can tell, the elimination of the USGS Ecosystems Mission Area, which includes the Bird Banding Lab and the Breeding Bird Survey, is still in there.
Would love to hear otherwise if anyone knows more.
Quick. Somebody tell Trump that the best way to own Elon is to restore all research grants and double NSF funding.
"Imagine the auto industry without 3D printing. NSF funded that. Artificial intelligence? NSF. MRI machines that help doctors diagnose you? NSF. Doppler radar technology that makes aviation safer by conquering wind shear? NSF. Duolingo‘s underlying programming? NSF. The internet itself? NSF."
Folks who feed your pets Hydrolyzed Protein food: Remember how difficult Royal Canin was to get during the pandemic? Well going into tarrifs I suggest swapping to Blue Buffalo if you can. Nearly all of their ingredients are sourced in the US and they are manufactured in the US as well.
1. After getting some further insight into changes at NSF (thanks to those who reached out), I deleted a previous post where I tried to make sense of Cheatham's memo as reported in the Science story below.
🚨 All staff for NSF’s Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM (EES) have just been fired.
In email to grantees: “the entire Division of Equity for Excellence in STEM has just been dissolved and the entire staff fired.”
High time for scientists, public, Congress, YOU to take action to #SaveNSF
It's #WorldMigratoryBirdDay and time to welcome back your favorite feathered friends. Take a look at the Bird Migration Explorer to find out where your neighborhood birds spent the last few months: explorer.audubon.org
BREAKING: NSF has frozen all grant funding, as of yesterday. It's unclear when they will resume funding awards, or why the pause has been put in place. www.nature.com/articles/d41...
🧪 Tip: You have the right to contest a grant termination, even though NSF says you don't. 🧵
On Friday, NSF terminated 402 grants (per Musk's DOGE).
The notification letters had one of the most egregious violations of fed regulations I've seen so far in these cases:
"not subject to appeal"
This would be an enormous loss for birds and bird conservation. The BBS and BBL datasets are the backbone of the work we do to understand why bird populations are declining and how to address it.
