Jeff Witters

Wait... this isn't just about birds? Husband, dad, Christian (Jesus kind, not GOP kind), birder, biology teacher, sometime scientist. Born at 330 ppm.

[Carl Hendrick @C_Hendrick]

Should AI chatbots be banned in the classroom? Yes. Here's why🧵⤵️

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@rbfrncs @TheBirdist Wait, what is a Scattering???

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@birdwarehouse_ Toucan Barbet says Do It!!!

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@Jolly_Jingo_250 What? God, stop mumbling

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@fairieteeth When I lived in CO, back roads were #1. Local state park was 5 min drive, nearest NF/BLM was 20-30 min. Depends on what I was in the mood for. If you live there, whatever is closest is best. If you’re visiting, many larger towns have protected areas nearby with varied topography

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@emxlymargaret My daughter and I watched it for a long time on Sat flying around, diving, catching fish. Only 650 miles due S to salt water!

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@fairieteeth … from 5 years ago!

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

Birds are cool. Especially ones from the tropics. Coppery-chested Jacamar #tropicalbirds #ecuador

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@gaydotlea If you’ve lived in one city you’re really making a point

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

Putnam’s Jumping Spider got me with those lil head tufts

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@CharismaKings @Rafa_Mangual Difference being that I was 3 when I was acting anti-socially with equal immaturity and disregard for others. My rage at being redirected had vastly different consequences for bystanders. It isn’t helpful making 3 vs 17 a case of apples to apples, “he without sin” etc

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@evornithology @TheBirdist @guttenbirder22 @RyanFMandelbaum I went a year ago. Get this OG guide app, a bit clunky but really useful. Then pick up a hard copy of Helm Birds of EC Friele & Restall. Many of Restall’s illustrations are not great but they mostly work for ID. Have EC pack downloaded from Merlin, though it’s 50% useful, tops.

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@candiburke Love 4! The lines are really good

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Winston Churchill fought his depression with bricks. He'd lay them for hours at his country home in Kent. He joined the bricklayers' union. And in 1921 he wrote about why it worked. It took psychology another 75 years to catch up.

He called his depression the "Black Dog." It followed him for decades. His method for fighting it back was as basic as it sounds: laying brick after brick, hour after hour.

Churchill spelled out his theory in a long essay for The Strand Magazine. People who think for a living, he wrote, can't fix a tired brain just by resting it. They have to use a different part of themselves. The part that moves the eyes and the hands. Woodworking, chemistry, bookbinding, bricklaying, painting. Anything that drags the body into a problem the mind can't solve by itself.

Modern psychology now calls this behavioral activation. It's one of the most-studied depression treatments out there. Depression sets a behavior trap. You feel bad, so you stop doing things, and doing less means less to feel good about. Feeling worse makes you do even less. The loop tightens until you can't breathe inside it.

Behavioral activation breaks the loop from the action side. You schedule the activity first, even when every part of you doesn't want to. Doing it produces small rewards: a wall gets straighter, a painting fills in, a messy room gets clean. Those small rewards slowly rewire the brain. Action comes first, and the feeling follows.

Researchers at the University of Washington put this to the test in 2006. They studied 241 adults with major depression and compared three treatments: behavioral activation, regular talk therapy, and antidepressants. For the people who were most severely depressed, behavioral activation matched the drugs. It beat the talk therapy. A 2014 review of more than 1,500 patients across 26 trials backed up the result.

Physical work like bricklaying does something extra on top of this. It crowds out rumination, the looping bad thoughts that grind people down during the worst stretches of depression. Bricklaying needs both hands and gives feedback brick by brick: each one is straight or crooked. After an hour you can see exactly how much wall you built. No room left for the mental chewing.

The line George Mack used in his post, "depression hates a moving target," is good poetry. The science behind it is sharper. Depression hates a brain that has somewhere else to be.

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@beaniebbl Exactly! Don’t be that bird, WATCH birds or other nature. Gets you out of your head bc they DGAF about you.

[Michael Inzlicht @minzlicht]

Imagine a 19-year-old scrolling TikTok. She watches a creator list five "signs you have undiagnosed anxiety." She recognizes three in herself. By the end of the week, she's describing herself as anxious to her friends. A month later, she's avoiding situations she used to handle fine.

What went wrong?

In a new paper by my PhD student Dasha Sandra, titled "Why mental health awareness can harm: Converging explanations for a societal problem", we argue that well-meaning mental health awareness can backfire, and we identify how. Four separate literatures (concept creep, nocebo effects, prevalence inflation, and illness self-labeling) have been circling the same problem from different angles. We show they converge on three mechanisms:

1.Awareness lowers the threshold for what counts as a disorder.
2. It trains people to scan their inner lives for symptoms and reinterpret normal distress as pathology.
3. Once someone adopts an illness identity, they behave in ways that confirm and deepen it.

The evidence is wide. Learning that loneliness is harmful makes solitude feel worse. Learning that stress is harmful worsens well-being and performance. Awareness videos about fake conditions like "wind turbine syndrome" produce real headaches. Trigger warnings raise anticipatory anxiety without reducing distress.

This does not mean awareness should stop. It means awareness can have unintended consequences, including manufacturing the suffering it tries to prevent. Inoculating people against these mechanisms works, and we already have evidence it does.

Link to paper: https://t.co/ucoGyhEuAj

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@coughdropsh Racket-tails (2 for 1 there), Sword-billed Hummingbird, Laughing Falcon. Honorable mention: literally all the others

[Trip Gabriel @tripgabriel]

The EPA's independent science arm did groundbreaking research to save lives. It studied fertility, asthma, wildfires, drinking water, climate change etc etc

In just one year, it has been almost completely dismantled

Of 1500 scientists, only 124 remain

https://t.co/05bluCvI2c

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@aadityad9 Gulls clearly don’t believe in gull identification either

[Jeff Witters @jeff_witters]

@coughdropsh Even with a group of birders, I have to catch myself from pointing out bird locations by tree species (can’t say midway up the box elder between the two hackberries) bc that’s not gonna work