Bird vs. Fish

Godwit Days

Today my mom and I are headed to this fest in CA! I’m writing this post after the fact as a reminder for what I packed and could have used, since I may well do this festival again 🙂 Honestly this festival was pretty easy to pack for, as the weather was about the same […]

Best Birds of 2026 – running list

I’m kicking off my annual best birds list, to be fleshed out at the end of the year!

A Rich Local History of Palynology: References

Thank you for reading my article: https://capemaymag.com/this-is-cape-may/nature/the-rich-local-history-of-palynology In keeping with the format of articles for the nature column of Cape May Magazine, we don’t have room for in-text citations or a reference section. So, for those who would like to consult the sources or enjoy further reading, here is the material I referenced for writing […]

Best Birds of 2025

Here were my best birds of the year! I haven’t yet fleshed out the stories here; check back later.

Creating A Vector Layer By Hand

I had been given some PDF maps with outlines to digitize, but with enough land features in the map to be able to geo-reference them. I screen-grabbed the maps from the PDFs and saved the screenshots as TIFF. Then, opened QGIS, added the Open Street Maps base layer and zoomed into my area of interest. […]

Weekend Fishing

Cut & Retie podcast episode this week: https://sites.libsyn.com/441516/ep-164-the-unsinkable-speckled-urine-bag “We get the gray trout/weakfish (whatever) rarely do you get any size. Normally they’re in a massive school on top of, you know, a wreck or a rock pile or something, kind of early fall/late summer, and rarely do they get > 10 in. Last year I […]

12 hr Pelagic

I was thrilled to get out on the water on the nicest November trip (weather-wise) I have enjoyed yet! Land temps ranged from the 40s into the 50s during the day. The day served as possibly the only Nov trip I have not been cold, once the sun was sufficiently high in the sky. This […]

Fishing

“I actually caught not a lot, 2 weakfish this year myself in the New England surf, which is more than I catch in 5 years combined unfortunately most years, but there’s been a lot of weakfish in southern New England late summer. How has the New Jersey weakfish bite been this year?” – Toby Lapinski […]

Cynoscion

It has been an honor to come onboard for the technical/stock assessment subcommittee for weakfish (Cynoscion regalis) which is currently managed by NJ at the genus level, but may be separated out to species giving spotted seatrout (Cynoscion nebulosus) its own independent regulation. I’m also serving as the NJ representative for the latter, though we […]

Acadia National Park

Happy Labor Day Weekend! We did a trip to Maine to celebrate my mom’s birthday. Today we crossed a NP off the bucket list! We drove the park loop most of the way, but turned off at Bar Harbor, so I’d still like to “close the loop” from there and drive back from Bar Harbor […]