tamarack

Every smallmouth I've caught and kept that had food in its stomach had one or more crawfish, sometimes with other items as well. Have not killed a smallie in more than 40 years but I'd guess their dietary habits haven't changed since then.

A couple years before I moved north in 1976 to work for Seven Islands, one of their techs was driving his sled back toward his truck, using the track he'd broken on the unplowed road while riding in several hours earlier. Turned a corner and there was a cow moose standing on the track - much preferring the now-firmed snow to the belly-deep powder off to the side. He began yelling at the moose and inching the sled closer, until the hair stood up on the moose's neck and she headed in. The fellow dove off into the deep stuff and wallowed away from the road while mama moose pretty much destroyed the cowling of the sled before wandering into the woods, fortunately on the opposite side from where the guy had gone. So he picked up the larger pieces and continued on his way with a story to tell.

Not a bear expert, but bears coming out of hibernation will sometimes tear into trees to get at the high-nutrient cambium layer. However, they've probably been out of their dens for a month or more - seems odd they would still be breaking trees now for that reason. Unless there was some critter in the tree that the bear was trying to catch, I don't know why the it did that. About the halfway point of leaf-out. Maple leaves are nearly full size, oaks approaching half and ash/basswood buds are open and shoots elongating. On another subject, sun is back out after about 2 minutes of RA+. More little pop-ups upstream.

Seems odd that my area in west-central Maine is now white. It was in the yellow right after April ended and we've had only 0.67" in May, <50% of normal and not the way to bury Stein. Maybe the April 30 rain wasn't part of the earlier map?

Common sense? Compassion? Maybe a touch of selfishness: A couple years back a young man who used to go to our church was doing a wheelie with a heavy bike when the back wheel caught on the pavement and flipped the machine on top of him. No helmet, brain damage, coma for weeks, they had to remove part of his skull, PT for months. His recovery was almost miraculous but a few days ago he fell down stairs (I'm guessing his earlier injuries contributed) and his right side now isn't working right. I think all that medical treatment runs well into 6 figures, maybe 7, and its bottom line comes from my insurance and yours. I'm not a fan of loud bikes either. Aren't you a big time snowmobiler? They are pretty loud too, just saying. Of course the sleds are usually out in the puckerbrush, not roaring down the street in front of one's house.

So do I. The D's nominee in 2016 was the only person who could potentially lose to Trump. The R's nominee was the only person who could potentially lose to HRC.

Another problem inherent with frost pockets is that the cold can be capricious - a bit of wind or cloud can make 10° difference. Median growing season here is 114 days but it's ranged from 88 days to 156. We've had June frosts in 6 of 23 springs with all other late frosts in May. Only one year (2011) has failed to bring a September frost..

We learned that our site is not one that's friendly to iffy-in-zone species, notably with Reliance peach. Planted one in 1998 a week after moving there on 5/15, then a taller one in early May 1999. That 2nd one was destroyed by a freeze a week after the transplant, while the earlier tree would triple in size each growing season (peaches are precocious) then mostly die back each winter. In 01-02 the temp never dropped below -12 and that spring we had hundreds of blossoms (1st we'd seen) and 100+ delicious fruits. 02-03 had a dozen mornings with minima -20 to -29, some with wind, and the tree was finished - got a weak sprout from beneath the graft and it didn't even survive the summer. Very glad we got to eat some peaches (along with blueberries, my favorite fruit) before learning that a zone 5 species would not do well in our zone 4 cold spot.

We do live there - 31° this morning. Last frost here has ranged from May 2 (2011) to June 12 (2004) and the median is May 24, so a frost on May 13 is nothing out of the ordinary.

Maine may have more bears than any other state in the lower 48 (WA and WI are also up there), but from the news it seems my old haunts in NNJ have more bear/people issues than here in the north. It's not the bears . . . (And I at PF's millennial/old bear comparison.)

You finished in 31st place on the snow table - ouch! Makes my 17th place look downright spectacular.

That works well if folks in the same business in the area do the same. If you're the only one who is grossly understaffed, such that opening the treasure chest is the only way to gain employees, the choices my be grim - jack up your prices and risk having much of your clientele leave for cheaper pastures or maintain prices and watch the expense/revenue ratio turn upside down. Or maybe one finds a way to make their product more attractive.

Our 2 went in opposite directions but ended up circling back to the same place, sort of. Our son did not have a good experience up thru HS, out of the in crowd, indifferent/resistant student, until - he learned between Jr and Sr year he could cram extra classes and gain enough credits to graduate in a half year. Made the honor roll for the one and only time. Asked about college, his reply was "I've done 12 years in these prions; I'm not signing over for another 4." And then was gone, getting away from those "crummy downeasters" and moving to San Francisco (where he found some crummy people, unsurprisingly.) A few moves and some time in the Navy and then he enrolled in a CA community college, moved to Queens and earned a 4-yr degree at Hunter College and wound up teaching English in Japan, now in his 18th year there. Daughter did the orthodox HS to college, got 2 English degrees which helped her to get a job teaching 11th-grade English and zeroed out her college loans. Now she's teaching her kids, with major help from our SIL, so no serious bumps when COVID arrived. We just found it ironic that 2 kids with exact opposite K-12 experiences - model student vs. rebel - both were teaching English. Though not in quite the same circumstances.

Of my 3 apple trees the Empire is poorest at converting blossoms to fruit - was also the last to begin flowering despite being the biggest of the three. Its (rare) fruit is very good and the one scabby little apple from there was the year's entire 3-tree crop last year. The Ultramac alternates between good-not-bumper crops and near nothing (last year) and the fruit is excellent. The Haralred was planted in 1999, a year after the other two, and has been the most severely pruned including removal of one of 2 equal forks about 10 years ago. I thought sacrificing half the tree was better than a paste-bomb split; April 2020 would've been a candidate, or perhaps the super crop of 2017 would've done it. The fruit is harder and a bit more tart than the Ultramac and takes a morning or two in the upper 20s to rein in that tartness. I've occasionally stuck some tree spikes into the ground, but apart from pruning have done no other culturing - no bug/scab/disease treatments. Most apples have some minor defects but they don't affect the flavor and the worst end up as applesauce or apple butter.

Aroostook has certainly been rewriting the record book for high max and min in recent years. Farmington co-op has an odd pattern for 21st century record warmth. In the cold season new maxima are common while mild minima much less so. Even with last December's mild mornings, 2000-onward has 4 high minima records and 12 high maxima. The opposite occurs in the warm season, with a roughly proportional amount of high minima records but few record high maxima. Exactly one record high has been set during met summer since 1988, just squeaking under the bar on August 31, 2010. The only time the site has reached 95 this century was 9/9/02 and last June's 94 was the hottest since then, though 5 days have reached 93 since 2002. Makes me wonder if the trees in the obs site vicinity are having an increasing effect.

Back in my days at UMaine an instructor said 400' elevation was like 1° of latitude - 70 miles poleward. Some years back there was a thread here discussing that ratio, and folks thought 500 or even 600' per degree was more reasonable. However, a few hundred feet certainly makes a difference, as others have noted. Some events that dropped 1-2" of slop here at 395' would produce 6" paste 5 miles south on Mile Hill up near 800'. In 1983 we visited a long-time friend in Blairstown, NW New Jersey, and had a deformation band dump 13" in about 8 hours on April 23, rather late in the season. That was at 1200' and driving was a challenge. 500' lower in town it was 4-5" of slop that couldn't stick on the pavement.

Haralred blossoms beginning to open. Empire and Ultramac usually 4-5 days later. That Haralred is showing thousands of blossom buds, its usual abundance and welcome after it had absolutely none (I looked very carefully) last year. Guess it just needed a rest.

Since 12/25/20 was the biggest melt-off since Jan 1996, it's easy to see such events as "bigger and more frequent" and the numbers probably support that impression. As for extreme cold, the difference appears to be more in the minima than maxima. I looked at 3 Maine sites, PWM, Ft. Kent and Farmington and found that really cold mornings have been scarce since 2000 but cold maxima seem proportional to the time span. Choosing convenient breakpoints with 30-45 sample obs: PWM: 100 year POR Minimum: -18, n=35. Jan. 27, 1994 (right at -18) is the only one since 1984. Maximum: +6, n=34. Five mornings post-2000, 2 of which came in the cold week following Christmas 2017.. Seven would be exactly proportional to the POR. Fort Kent: 76 year POR Minimum: -35, n=44. Five came in Jan 2009, no others since 2000. Maximum: -6, n=44. Ten came post-2000, including the -15 in Jan. 2014, 2nd coldest min on record. Farmington: 121 year POR (skipping 1893-99 as records for that period are often out of line with other sites.) Minimum: -30, n=29. Six in the 1990s but none since. Coldest 21st century is 29/27 on Jan. 16-17, 2009. No other mornings colder than -24. Maximum: -1, n=31. Five since 2000 including the 3rd coldest max. If threshold is zero, n=45 and post-2000 has 8 such minima. For those 3 sites at least, extra cold mornings are substantially decreasing in this century while cold maxima are running about proportional to the full PORs.

Just checked Climod2 and BDL is "M" for April 1996. Precip/temps would support some snow on the 7th and 9th but their getting another 8" (on 0.41" LE) seems a stretch for April. Of course, Norfolk at 1340' had 20" that month so who knows?

I see a "flex point" at which temp rise overwhelms potential snow from increased precip. Maybe that point is now at PHL or NYC or BWI, and will slowly progress northward assuming current or similar trends are maintained. Be a long time in that scenario before the flex passes over NNE. (Of course, places below the flex will have increasing variation, like 09-10 when BWI had 7" more snow than CAR.)

Bingo! BDL snowfall "gaps": OCT NOV DEC JAN FEB MAR APR MAY 10/1/1995 6/1/1996 0.0 5.6 20.0 42.8 20.6 17.8 0.0 0.0 106.9 10/1/1996 6/1/1997 10/1/1997 6/1/1998 10/1/1998 6/1/1999 10/1/1999 6/1/2000 10/1/2000 6/1/2001 8.1 10.4 21.4 13.5 0.0 0.0 53.4 10/1/2001 6/1/2002 3.0 10/1/2002 6/1/2003 0.0 5.0 13.6 15.6 21.4 11.1 2.3 0.0 69.1

Must be a different data set, maybe Brainard Field or downtown? For there to be an 11-inch increase, the 2011-20 period would need to be 33"/year snowier than 1981-90. The '80s were terrible but not that terrible. Checked my numbers (from Utah Climate Center and Climod2) and found a mistake: Corrected BDL from my data is 47.0" for 81-10 and 51.5" for 91-20, so a 4.5" gain rather than the 2.7 I posted earlier. Worth noting that the UCC data was missing 5 of 6 winters 96-97 to 01-02, which could cause issues in comparisons. Edit: The monthly numbers for 91-20 match my BDL almost exactly - couple months are 0.1" different, which could just be rounding error.

For those into conspiracy things, here's a beauty from the Franklin County Sheriff's report: 05/07/2021 1502hrs, Deputy Couture took a complaint from an AT hiker near the “Height of the Land” from Pennsylvania who claimed that while on his hike, he was being targeted by people using microwave weapons, and various electronic weapons and devises to harass him. He wanted to report this before he left. Guy must have lost the tinfoil hat while thrashing thru Mahoosuc Notch. ("Height of Land" is the camera lovers' turnout from Rt 17 about 10 miles south of Rangeley.)

hat Boston increase looks legit but the Hartford one doesn't. Mt data is from BDL and has the norms increasing from 49.6" to 52.3".

According to the Hopkins data, Maine's new cases are considerably higher than the national average, after a year of always being below that average, and seeing ICU cases at 80-90% of the post-holidays surge is cause for a bit of concern. It is odd that a state near the top for vaccination percentage and with considerable restrictions still in place is having these numbers. Are we merely testing at a far higher rate than elsewhere? Also, in recent days nearly half of all new cases in Maine have been in folks age 30 or younger. I've not seen a breakdown of ICU cases by age, but suspect it would show a much lower proportion of those young folks than do the new case numbers.