Tootfinder

Lesser Goldfinch, standing on a sunflower stalk, while hiding in the foliage. LA Arboretum, Arcadia, California, USA. September, 2025. #laarboretum #bird #birds

"Fossil-fuelled heat has caused tropical birds to decline by ‘up to 38%’ since 1950s"
#FossilFuels #Climate #ClimateChange

Fossil-fuelled heat has caused tropical birds to decline by ‘up to 38%’ since 1950s - Carbon Brief
An uptick in heat extremes has caused tropical bird populations to decline by up to 38% since the 1950s, according to new analysis.

Last night J came across a hedgehog by the covered grid. I stood and watched it whilst she went to get water and some food.
I looked up into the kitchen and looked back and the hedgehog was gone.
I doubt it was needing food, they've taken from the bird food on the ground feeders in the past. It was more the water we were concerned about.

So just for my amusement I asked chatgpt "why does the porridge bird lay its eggs in the air" and got this response, which is not, quite, right.
#chatgpt

it's wild out here #Uckermark #project25

Found this going through my 8 year old iPad (image is from 2013 by @…)
What a difference 12 years makes, huhn?

Design and optimization of neural networks for multifidelity cosmological emulation
Yanhui Yang, Simeon Bird, Ming-Feng Ho, Mahdi Qezlou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07184

Design and optimization of neural networks for multifidelity cosmological emulation
Accurate and efficient simulation-based emulators are essential for interpreting cosmological survey data down to nonlinear scales. Multifidelity emulation techniques reduce simulation costs by combining high- and low-fidelity data, but traditional regression methods such as Gaussian processes struggle with scalability in sample size and dimensionality. In this work, we present T2N-MusE, a neural network framework characterized by (i) a novel 2-step multifidelity architecture, (ii) a 2-stage Ba…

"Saving the world’s fattest parrot: can we vaccinate our rarest species before bird flu gets to them?"
#Parrots #Animals

An American dipper, Cinclus mexicanus, living up to its name at Snow Lake earlier this week. These guys are aquatic songbirds, basically thrushes who saw what ducks do and decided it looked fun
#naturalist #wildlife #bird

🦖🦕
via @…

Florida’s Everglades National Park is often referred to as the most endangered national park in the United States.
In 1968, developers tried to construct the largest airport in the world in the middle of the park,
which was already suffering from a multitude of environmental crises:
disrupted water flow, a drastic decline in the bird population, human development, invasion of exotic species, and the endangerment of the Florida panther.
After an upswell of public outcry…

DeSantis Races to Open Immigrant Detention Camp in Swamp Amid Hurricane Season
Even before “Alligator Alcatraz,” Ron DeSantis had defined his political legacy by gleeful cruelty against immigrants.

Got woken up by a dumb bird tweeting the same pattern over and over and over and over again. Fell back asleep only to get woken up by the same bird but in my dream. 🤦‍♂️

I always wondered if the shiny scales made them more conductive. https://flipboard.com/@cbcnews/british-columbia-i8sdok9nz/-/a-0hKECWU_QJiZ3BJuKmSPTQ:a:107108217-/0

B.C. brush fire sparked by bird dropping fish on power lines, firefighters say
Firefighters in B.C.'s Interior believe they have identified the cause of a small brush fire and power outage — an osprey and a fish. Ashcroft Fire …

We've been visited by a humming bird hawk moth, aka bee moth. Its a moth, not a bird, but it feeds by hovering while sipping nectar from deep-throated flowers, like a humming bird.
I managed to get these pictures. I'll try to get some more over the weekend.
#Bloom #mothstodon

Just finished "Hilda and the Bird Parade" by Luke Pearson, and as usual with Pearson's "Hilda" books, it's tremendous! A lovely magical world, childhood curiosity paired with responsibility, and that touch of each parental love.
#AmReading

BirdRecorder's AI on Sky: Safeguarding birds of prey by detection and classification of tiny objects around wind turbines
Nico Klar, Nizam Gifary, Felix P. G. Ziegler, Frank Sehnke, Anton Kaifel, Eric Price, Aamir Ahmad
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.18136

BirdRecorder's AI on Sky: Safeguarding birds of prey by detection and classification of tiny objects around wind turbines
The urgent need for renewable energy expansion, particularly wind power, is hindered by conflicts with wildlife conservation. To address this, we developed BirdRecorder, an advanced AI-based anti-collision system to protect endangered birds, especially the red kite (Milvus milvus). Integrating robotics, telemetry, and high-performance AI algorithms, BirdRecorder aims to detect, track, and classify avian species within a range of 800 m to minimize bird-turbine collisions. BirdRecorder integrat…

Could this bird sound The vOICe spectrogram-based soundscapes? https://youtu.be/hCQCP-5g5bo?t=1066 by @…; starling "can record and playback virtually any sound"…

Looked up a truly dreadful piece of CanLit I was made to read in high school (because the author is now subject to book bans in Alberta), it seems whoever was writing the Wikipedia article fell asleep mid sentence, which is quite relatable given the subject material

My project that I completed yesterday. An old patio umbrella base, a fence post from a big box store, two old wall brackets for flower baskets, a couple of bird feeders that were on sale at CanTire, and a repurposed squirrel baffle. About $100 in total cost, not including the black oil seed. It's positioned right outside our sunroom for bifd watching, by us and our cat Casper.
#DIY #Birdwatching #Gardening

If it’s anything like their “dire wolf,” they’ll sink millions into bringing the world… a fat kiwi. https://rssfeed.media/@abcfeeds/114910888061846217

The Early Career Workshop of GR-Amaldi 2025
S Al-Shammari, C P L Berry, C E A Chapman-Bird, F T Chowdhury, K Cunningham, M Emma, R Gray, C Hoy, I S Heng, M Korobko, E Maggio, A-K Malz, H Middleton, M Prathaban, I M Romero-Shaw, G Shaifullah, S Singh, J Steinlechner, K Toland, D Williams, M J Williams
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.03360…

The Early Career Workshop of GR-Amaldi 2025
Gravitational physics and astronomy have developed rapidly over the last decade, driven by new observations and theoretical breakthroughs. As new as the science and technology of this field are, its greatest asset may be the body of early-career researchers actively engaged in driving it forward. With the aim of bringing together this community of enthusiastic scientists from a broad array of disciplines, the organisers of the GR-Amaldi meeting joined with the Gravitational-Wave Early Career Sc…

Dynamic Bayesian Item Response Model with Decomposition (D-BIRD): Modeling Cohort and Individual Learning Over Time
Hansol Lee, Jason B. Cho, David S. Matteson, Benjamin W. Domingue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.21723

Dynamic Bayesian Item Response Model with Decomposition (D-BIRD): Modeling Cohort and Individual Learning Over Time
We present D-BIRD, a Bayesian dynamic item response model for estimating student ability from sparse, longitudinal assessments. By decomposing ability into a cohort trend and individual trajectory, D-BIRD supports interpretable modeling of learning over time. We evaluate parameter recovery in simulation and demonstrate the model using real-world personalized learning data.

I'm not sure much has changed since 1969. Sympathy by Rare Bird
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vN6-1Zeg2w&list=RD9vN6-1Zeg2w&start_radio=1

Last week one of my milkweeds was covered with several large, healthy-looking, Monarch caterpillars.
The caterpillars ate all of the leaves, thus leaving them hungry and quite visible to the many birds in our area.
The birds ate all of the Monarch caterpillars.
We have about a half dozen milkweeds - mostly the California native types - around the house. I will plant more, especially the type that was devoured by the caterpillars, but I will cover them with bird netting.

OnlineBEV: Recurrent Temporal Fusion in Bird's Eye View Representations for Multi-Camera 3D Perception
Junho Koh, Youngwoo Lee, Jungho Kim, Dongyoung Lee, Jun Won Choi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.08644

OnlineBEV: Recurrent Temporal Fusion in Bird's Eye View Representations for Multi-Camera 3D Perception
Multi-view camera-based 3D perception can be conducted using bird's eye view (BEV) features obtained through perspective view-to-BEV transformations. Several studies have shown that the performance of these 3D perception methods can be further enhanced by combining sequential BEV features obtained from multiple camera frames. However, even after compensating for the ego-motion of an autonomous agent, the performance gain from temporal aggregation is limited when combining a large number of imag…

Quasi-steady aerodynamics predicts the dynamics of flapping locomotion
Olivia Pomerenk, Leif Ristroph
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.19899 https://arxiv.org/pd…

Quasi-steady aerodynamics predicts the dynamics of flapping locomotion
The propulsion of a flapping wing or foil is emblematic of bird flight and fish swimming. Previous studies have identified hallmarks of the propulsive dynamics that have been attributed to unsteady effects such as the formation and shedding of edge vortices and wing-vortex interactions. Here we show that the key behaviors of heaving flight are captured by a quasi-steady aerodynamic model that predicts forces from motions without needing to solve for the flows. We address the forward dynamics in…

Constraints on the extreme mass-ratio inspiral population from LISA data
Shashwat Singh, Christian E. A. Chapman-Bird, Christopher P L Berry, John Veitch
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16399

Constraints on the extreme mass-ratio inspiral population from LISA data
Gravitational waves from extreme mass-ratio inspirals (EMRIs), the inspirals of stellar-mass compact objects into massive black holes, are predicted to be observed by the Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA). A sufficiently large number of EMRI observations will provide unique insights into the massive black hole population. We have developed a hierarchical Bayesian inference framework capable of constraining the parameters of the EMRI population, accounting for selection biases. We levera…

Decision-Making on Timing and Route Selection: A Game-Theoretic Approach
Chenlan Wang, Mingyan Liu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17206 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Decision-Making on Timing and Route Selection: A Game-Theoretic Approach
We present a Stackelberg game model to investigate how individuals make their decisions on timing and route selection. Group formation can naturally result from these decisions, but only when individuals arrive at the same time and choose the same route. Although motivated by bird migration, our model applies to scenarios such as traffic planning, disaster evacuation, and other animal movements. Early arrivals secure better territories, while traveling together enhances navigation accuracy, for…

From Observational Data to Clinical Recommendations: A Causal Framework for Estimating Patient-level Treatment Effects and Learning Policies
Rom Gutman, Shimon Sheiba, Omer Noy Klien, Naama Dekel Bird, Amit Gruber, Doron Aronson, Oren Caspi, Uri Shalit
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11381

From Observational Data to Clinical Recommendations: A Causal Framework for Estimating Patient-level Treatment Effects and Learning Policies
We propose a framework for building patient-specific treatment recommendation models, building on the large recent literature on learning patient-level causal models and inspired by the target trial paradigm of Hernan and Robins. We focus on safety and validity, including the crucial issue of causal identification when using observational data. We do not provide a specific model, but rather a way to integrate existing methods and know-how into a practical pipeline. We further provide a real wor…

Modeling the impact of temperature and bird migration on the spread of West Nile virus
Pride Duve, Felix Sauer, Renke L\"uhken
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.14740 https://

Modeling the impact of temperature and bird migration on the spread of West Nile virus
West Nile virus (WNV) is a climate-sensitive mosquito-borne arbovirus circulating between mosquitoes of the genus Culex and birds, with a potential spillover to humans and other mammals. Recent trends in climatic change, characterized by early and/or prolonged summer seasons, increased temperatures, and above-average rainfall, probably facilitated the spread of WNV in Europe, including Germany. In this work, we formulate a spatial WNV model consisting of a system of parabolic partial differenti…

Good morning from Harlem
#Photography #GoodMorning #Sunrise #NYC

Formation of ultracold $^{39}$K$^{133}$Cs Feshbach molecules
Charly Beulenkamp, Krzysztof P. Zamarski, Robert C. Bird, C. Ruth Le Sueur, Jeremy M. Hutson, Manuele Landini, Hanns-Christoph N\"agerl
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16520

Formation of ultracold $^{39}$K$^{133}$Cs Feshbach molecules
We report the creation of an ultracold gas of bosonic $^{39}$K$^{133}$Cs molecules. We first demonstrate a cooling strategy relying on sympathetic cooling of $^{133}$Cs to produce an ultracold mixture. From this mixture, weakly bound molecules are formed using a Feshbach resonance at 361.7 G. The molecular gas contains $7.6(10)\times 10^3$ molecules with a lifetime of about 130 ms, limited by two-body decay. We perform Feshbach spectroscopy to observe several new interspecies resonances and cha…

Intermediate Interaction Strategies for Collective Behavior
Y. Kikuchi, M. Iwamoto
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09457 https://arxiv.org…

Intermediate Interaction Strategies for Collective Behavior
From bird flocks and fish schools to migrating cell sheets, collective motion is a ubiquitous biological phenomenon that inspires quantitative modeling through self-propelled particle (SPP) frameworks. Conventional SPP models prescribe either distance-based (metric) or rank-based (topological) interactions; however, empirical studies indicate that real groups may blend both types of interaction. Motivated by this graded perception, we introduce a new three-dimensional SPP model in which metric …

LATIS: Comparing Galaxy and IGM Tomography Maps as Tracers of Large-scale Structure and Protoclusters at $z \sim 2.5$
Andrew B. Newman, Nima Chartab, Mahdi Qezlou, Gwen C. Rudie, Guillermo A. Blanc, Daniel D. Kelson, Simeon Bird, Caitlin Casey, Enrico Congiu, Olga Cucciati, Denise Hung, Brian C. Lemaux, Victoria P\'erez, Jorge Zavala
https://

LATIS: Comparing Galaxy and IGM Tomography Maps as Tracers of Large-scale Structure and Protoclusters at $z \sim 2.5$
We investigate the consistency of intergalactic medium (IGM) tomography and galaxy surveys as tracers of the cosmic web and protoclusters at $z \sim 2.5$. We use maps from the Ly$α$ Tomography IMACS Survey (LATIS), which trace the distributions of Lyman-break galaxies (LBGs) and IGM Ly$α$ absorption on $\simeq 4$ $h^{-1}$ cMpc scales within the same large volume. Overall, the joint distribution of IGM absorption and LBG density is well constrained and accurately described by a simple physical…

EffiComm: Bandwidth Efficient Multi Agent Communication
Melih Yazgan, Allen Xavier Arasan, J. Marius Z\"ollner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19354 https://

EffiComm: Bandwidth Efficient Multi Agent Communication
Collaborative perception allows connected vehicles to exchange sensor information and overcome each vehicle's blind spots. Yet transmitting raw point clouds or full feature maps overwhelms Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communications, causing latency and scalability problems. We introduce EffiComm, an end-to-end framework that transmits less than 40% of the data required by prior art while maintaining state-of-the-art 3D object detection accuracy. EffiComm operates on Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature m…

Green Heron. Descanso Gardens, La Canada Flintridge, California, USA. July 2025. #descansogardens #heron #greenheron

SlimComm: Doppler-Guided Sparse Queries for Bandwidth-Efficient Cooperative 3-D Perception
Melih Yazgan, Qiyuan Wu, Iramm Hamdard, Shiqi Li, J. Marius Zoellner
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.13007

SlimComm: Doppler-Guided Sparse Queries for Bandwidth-Efficient Cooperative 3-D Perception
Collaborative perception allows connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) to overcome occlusion and limited sensor range by sharing intermediate features. Yet transmitting dense Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) feature maps can overwhelm the bandwidth available for inter-vehicle communication. We present SlimComm, a communication-efficient framework that integrates 4D radar Doppler with a query-driven sparse scheme. SlimComm builds a motion-centric dynamic map to distinguish moving from static objects and gene…

Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching
Panwang Xia, Qiong Wu, Lei Yu, Yi Liu, Mingtao Xiong, Lei Liang, Yongjun Zhang, Yi Wan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10716 ht…

Revisiting Cross-View Localization from Image Matching
Cross-view localization aims to estimate the 3 degrees of freedom pose of a ground-view image by registering it to aerial or satellite imagery. It is essential in GNSS-denied environments such as urban canyons and disaster zones. Existing methods either regress poses directly or align features in a shared bird's-eye view (BEV) space, both built upon accurate spatial correspondences between perspectives. However, these methods fail to establish strict cross-view correspondences, yielding only co…

Good morning from Harlem
#Photography #GoodMorning #Sunrise #NYC