Air's Wild Acres
Small goats and small batch cheesemaking on a small farm, all with big laughs.
Category: Research
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#TheNextBeWhom/WhateverYouWantWhenYouGrowUp
Sometimes I love my job, but sometimes it frustrates me. Not just because science is fucking hard, but because every scientist is subject to a series of outside pressures; pressure to be the best, pressure to do it all, pressure to forget that you like doing anything other than your research… While many of these…
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Post highlight: Nerds Without Borders!
I went to a conference last week, the World Food Prize, which had a strong theme regarding #WomeninSTEM, and encouraging young students to enter agricultural development. However, I really struggle with that dialogue sometimes, as typically the people discussing those topics are older, very successful, and only talk about the highlights of their careers. As…
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Money isn’t everything when it comes to conservation
Lately, there has been a great deal of coverage on pollinator health in the media, and the need for conservation of bees in particular. Obviously, as a conservationist and an interdisciplinary agricultural professional, I am strongly in support of conserving any species, especially those with huge economic impacts in agriculture, like the pollinators. However, I…
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Entomological Society of America (ESA) Science Policy Fellows do DC!
Increasingly, funding for science research is fairly tight, and many professional societies and higher education institutions have begun programs to advocate on Capitol Hill for their fields. The Entomological Society of America (ESA) began a Science Policy Fellowship program in 2014, selecting 5 individuals (myself amongst them) to advocate on the Hill, learn about policy,…
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Patterns and pastures.
In the recent weeks, I passed my comprehensive exam, visited with a fantastic Carabidae specialist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History (another #loveyourtaxonomist post is likely to follow about this trip), and camped at one of the most beautiful places in PA (“It feels like we are hiking into ‘The Hobbit!’” said a young hiker…
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#NowReading – 5/24/14
In trying (and this week, not doing such a great job of it) to be more active on my blog, I have started to follow several other blogs that I really appreciate. One of my new favorites is Dynamic Ecology, and while I know very little about the authors, I very much appreciate the type…
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Excited Scientists?
I’ve had several interactions with people in the last few weeks which have lead me to question what level of enthusiasm is “appropriate” for science. Quite commonly I am one of the loudest and most jovial people in the room because I do get incredibly excited about the work that I do. People apparently hear…
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“If you got a tattoo of an insect…
… what would it be?” one of my friends recently asked me (who, has a tattoo of a green lacewing). In the few days prior to that, I had spent some time working with an ant taxonomist at the University of Guadalajara (Dr. Miguel Vasquez Bolaños), and had commented that he was so dedicated to…
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Podcasts, selfies, and specimens
One of my entomology colleagues, Brittany Dodson, and I were recently discussing the idea of starting a blog. I had commented that I rarely post anything in my actual blog, and the most recent post I had done was something about pinning beetles (it was actually about a Facebook game a few of us had…
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Sentinel Waxworms
I expanded my sentinel waxworm sampling to include more samples early in the Spring. While we’ve been sampling with waxworms after crop emergence for several years, this year I wanted to see if we could capture what was happening prior to crop planting. I was worried that since we had a long, cold, wet Spring…
Air's Wild Acres 