I got some exciting news late last week: the blog post I submitted to the NESCent evolution blogging competition, “Do mother birds play God?” was selected as one of two winners! There was some stiff competition, and I’m quite honored that the judges chose my blog among all the great entries (you can see them [...]

Nate Dappen and I spent the last night of our whirlwind tour of Western Australia at a place called Yeagarup Dunes. The dunes are located in D’Entrecasteaux National Park, a park on the wild, windswept coast of extreme southwestern Australia. But these are dunes with a difference – they’re not on the coast at all. [...]

I’m officially launching a new website today: Sea To Sky: Birds of the Santa Monica Mountains. When I moved to LA in 2006, I was impressed with the diversity of birds in the area. I knew there were great birds in southern California, but I didn’t realize how many wonderful spots there would be close [...]

It’s DDIG season. That means that I, along with most other Ph.D. candidates in my field, have spent the last several weeks working on an NSF Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (or DDIG). A lot of the graduate school experience (in the sciences, at least) is applying for small grants to support your research. The DDIG [...]

In this second installment of our Biology Road Trip series, we’ll highlight some of the remarkable wildlife of Southwest Australia. As you may recall, Nathan Dappen and I were in Perth for the ISBE meeting last month, and we managed to explore a bit of the countryside to the south of Perth once the conference [...]

What makes an image iconic? Why do some nature photographs captivate viewers, even those who wouldn’t call themselves nature lovers? These are the questions that motivate photographer Scott Linstead’s new book, Decisive Moments: Creating Iconic Imagery. Scott has quickly risen through the ranks of pro nature photographers in just a few years’ time, and has [...]

After the ISBE meeting in Perth, my buddy Nate Dappen and I rented an SUV and headed south. We had only four days to spend in Southwest Australia, so we made ourselves a ridiculously full itinerary. One night at the Dryandra Woodland, one night at Stirling Range National Park, one night at Cheynes Beach, and [...]

About this time last year, I was preparing an application for the North American Nature Photography Association (NANPA) College Scholarship. Through this program, about a dozen young photographers in college or graduate school get to attend NANPA’s annual Nature Photography Summit. I had the honor of being selected to receive one of the scholarships in [...]

I just returned to LA from a 2-week trip to southwestern Australia, where I gave a talk at the 13th International Behavioral Ecology Congress in Perth, WA. I got some great feedback on my talk and met some really excellent people. And for a few days before and after the meeting, I got to see [...]

Canopy in the Clouds is a really cool website created by a photographer, Drew Fulton, a tropical plant ecologist, Greg Goldsmith, and a cinematographer, Colin Witherill, and funded by National Geographic Society Young Explorers Grants (the same program that has partly funded my dissertation research on anoles). Through an intuitive interface, users can explore different [...]