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.

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.

This is far from the worst thing Trump and Musk are doing, but it hits close to home. My time in an AmeriCorps program at Trout Lake, WA my first year out of college literally launched my career and set me on the path to where I am today. apnews.com/article/amer...

Do you remember getting piggyback rides from your parents when you were little? Loons have that exact same experience! Learn more about the mighty loon at our exhibit, Knowing Nature: Stories of the Boreal Forest!

Excited to see this literature review of coastal bird stewardship & management strategies w/ a focus on the Gulf published in JFO. This was Jennifer Fuller's first first-authored paper, & we worked with an amazing team of scientists to prepare & publish this work! journal.afonet.org/vol96/iss1/a...

U.S. Birders, By the Numbers • At-home birders: 91 million people • Away-from-home birders: 43 million people • Time spent birding in 2022: 7.2 billion days

Great to see the new BBS trends out!

The Institute for Bird Populations is a small but mighty bird conservation organization that is close to my heart (I worked with them for 8 years). They run the MAPS & MoSI programs that provide the demographic data essential for understanding the causes of bird population declines. (1/2)

Come work with us! We're hiring a Senior Manager, Quantitative Science on National Audubon Society's Science Team (1/2) audubon.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/en-US/Audubo...

Like birds and models? Dr. Erin Bayne and I are currently recruiting a 2 year postdoc to come work with us at the Boreal Avian Modelling project on boreal bird models and applications of those models. Full details are here tinyurl.com/4yxju63k. Feel free to get in touch with qs!

🚨BREAKING. From a program officer at the National Science Foundation, a list of keywords that can cause a grant to be pulled. I will be sharing screenshots of these keywords along with a decision tree. Please share widely. This is a crisis for academic freedom & science.

NEW: We obtained the directions NSF program officers are following to review all grants for compliance with the Trump EOs and the turmoil it has created in an agency mandated to broaden STEM participation. Our story: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

Some good news

Most of the people reading this have a sense of how bad things are right now. So for encouragement, here's a thread with examples of folks fighting back.

Growing thread compiling lists of websites, reports and datasets that have been taken down

@amornith.bsky.social's Latin American / Caribbean Conservation Research Grant program is now open! Learn more and apply here: americanornithology.org/awards-grant...

Looting should be the least of our concerns right now. Also, if you haven’t read A Paradise Built in Hell yet, go do so. That book has stuck with me perhaps more than any other in the way it describes the difference between the elite and the majority of us in response to disasters. 1/2

One tweet contains no nuance, so I'll post this great summary from a year ago by David Wallace-Wells, for those who want nuance on the causes of fires and the role of climate change vis-a-vis other factors

I'm pleased to share that the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI) is now accepting applications for its first round of Scientific Translation of Research Knowledge (STORK) funding. nabci-us.org/stork-grants... [1/3]

Migratory swift roosts are one of my favorite natural spectacles! Here in Portland, hundreds of people of all ages & walks of life come out to watch 10K+ Vaux’s Swifts funneling into a chimney at dusk, cheering as the swifts evade a hungry hawk waiting for dinner. Incredible!

#NewProfilePic 27 years after first learning about Project Puffin - an @audubonsociety project led by Steve Kress & now @don_e_lyons reintroducing Atlantic Puffins to islands off Maine - I finally made it to Egg Rock. Best of all, I got to hold a puffin chick!! Thanks Don!

*knock knock* hi! Nicole Michel here, quantitative scientist at National Audubon Society based in Portland, Oregon. I post (infrequently) about science, birds, stats, cats, climate, my garden, and whatever else catches my eye.