A lot of my time at work is spent writing things like:

function dprime = calcDprime(pH,pF)
   pH(pH==0) = eps;
   pH(pH==1) = 1-eps;
   pF(pF==0) = eps;
   pF(pF==1) = 1-eps;
   dprime = norminv(pH,0,1) - norminv(pF,0,1);

so I must confess a good deal of excitement about being able to do something resembling field work. Yes. See, I work with starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) and we’ve kind of gotten into a short supply of them, and that means we get to catch them. It’s kind of a bad time of year for it. Normally the lab’s collection trips involve a drive out in the middle of winter to a dairy farm, where starlings like to flock inside barns, and can be caught by stringing up mist nets across the barn door. But these days (i.e. breeding season) they’re dispersed, foraging in little family groups. About a week ago I saw lots of little grayish-brown fledglings hanging around in trees, which they’d leave any time it looked like mom or dad picked something up, at which point they’d come swooping down and start screeching and shouldering each other out of the way in the hopes of a handout. Very cute. The juveniles are pretty self-sufficient at this point, but the adults are still all spread out, and they’re smart little buggers, which means if we set up mist nets somewhere (several people have offered their back yards) and do manage to catch a couple, you can be sure the other birds will quickly decide not to go foraging in that particular place. Cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis), on the other hand, are apparently as dumb as posts, and, according to my mentor, will often fly right back into the mist net you just painfully (those big red beaks aren’t just for looks) extracted them from. We’re going to try it anyway, which means a couple of us get to sit out in the soon to be 90 degree weather throwing stale bread into someone’s lawn. A few hours into this exercise I may start imitating David Attenborough, trying to imagine I’m in some exotic South American jungle. It’s still going to be a lot more fun than statistics.

(cdm | MoveOverDavidAttenborough)