Biomechanics Downunder

Ok, so it turns out birding is hard. I mean you walk down the street and think there are birds literally everywhere, but until you start trying to count them you dont realise that they are just the same 6 birds. I only managed to add another 14 species in these two weeks, despite visiting the Bellbird bushland, west of Brisbane, and the Kendron Wetlands near the airport, bringing me to a meagre 59 species. Maybe i just suck since my dad seems to be doing quite well on his big year, and even my honours student Jordan, who only started two weeks ago is up to 45 species. Not good enough. Striated heron Toowong 3 Fig bird Toowong 3 brahminy kite North Pine river 3 Black face cuckcoo shrike Kawana 3 Long billed corella Bellbird 3 Rufus Fantail Bellbird 3 Grey butcherbird Bellbird 3 Spotted turtle dove lake kawana 3 Bush stone curlew UQ 3 pied stilt Kedron Brook Wetlands 4 chestnut teal duck Kedron Brook Wetlands 4 white bellied sea eagle Kedron Brook Wetlands 4 tawny gras

The big year has begun This year i have decided to attempt the infamous big year, inspired partly by the awesome Owen Wilson / Jack Black / Steve Martin movie, but mostly as a really good excuse to get out and see some new places. With our push into robotics the amount of field work we get to do has been less than would be ideal, for a biologist like myself whose main training has been out in the field. But the year started with a bang. With the Help of Taylor Dick (UQ) I managed to see 50 species in the first two weeks. Week 1 was helped by a trip to Oxley Common. Taylor and I were crook from a flu we had picked up in the cold wasteland that is canada (no offence canadians). I was feeling so weak that i didn't bother bring along the DSLR camera to get any good photos. Could barely carry the bird field guide. BUt lucky we did. The highlights were the red-backed fairy wren, and the superb fairy wren. number name site week 92 pelican Strathpine 1 323 Crested pigeon Oxley

Well 2020 is finally here. My plan for this year is to start posting more. Looks like i haven't posted much for the last two year. Not for lack of will, but rather a complete lack of time. However this year i am going to assign a higher priority to posting more, it it becomes more of a habit. 2019 was a great year. The Clemente biorobotics and biomechanics lab exploded in size and we saw lots of new members joining. We moved into a new room, and now have an extensive system of rapid prototying, laser cutting and more. We have pushed into the field of machine learning, both in our work on animal movement using accelerometers but also into machine vision markerless motion capture, mostly thanks to the hard work of Jojo Schultz. We only got out five papers, i hope we can do better this year. Brunton, E.A., Clemente, C.J. and Burnett, S.E., 2019. Not all urban landscapes are the same: interactions between urban land use and stress in a large herbivorous mammal. Ecological