Sarah (SK) Winnicki

This year I have been inspired by the artists in my life who remind me that I can view art as a process-- something I can do for the sake of practicing my techniques, flexing my creativity, and relaxing, rather than for a final product. As generative AI makes the claim that the product is more important than the process, I spent the year intentionally trying to internalize the opposite by doing art for the sake of the process rather than the product. At the end of the day, I

Brown-headed Cowbirds ( Molothrus ater ) are notorious for their breeding system called "brood parasitism"-- they lay their eggs in the nests of hundreds of other bird species, forcing those birds to feed their ravenous young. They've been painted as dastardly villains, but what are they really?   In 2019 I found myself getting really frustrated with Facebook comments advocating for removing cowbird eggs from host nests in Kansas, where I lived at the time researching cowbir

While I was in graduate school, I fell very ill from what we ultimately determined to be issues with my adrenal glands, a pair of tiny hormone- (signal) producing glands on your kidneys. These glands are most famous for producing our healthy stress responses, but chronic stress can make these stress responses way less healthy for us. I talk a lot about stress physiology online, but I also wanted to share tips in one place along with links to other resources. Standard disclaim

Y ellow-rumped Warbler ("Butterbutt") in an urban Columbus (Ohio, USA) park, April 2025 Growing up as a young birder, I knew that I could go to a few magical parks to see migrating birds, like brilliant colorful warblers. I would beg my parents to drive me two hours to Magee Marsh in Northwest Ohio to see the birds with thousands of my fellow birders, but obviously we could not go very often. It was only once I started getting better at birding that I realized that those ve

The recent news on so-called "de-extinction" inspired me to consider what true de-extinction would actually look like, especially for scientists who study the ecology and conservation of at-risk species. I had a good time speculating (on BlueSky) about a hypothetical fantasy story chronically the rediscovery of spontaneously and mysteriously de-extinct Carolina Parakeets (a species native to eastern North America which was declared extinct in the 1930s). That inspired me to a