Pellice

Yesterday, May 13, was NJ's World Series of Birding, held annually on the second Saturday in May (and now part of a larger "Big Day" of birding observed globally. It was the 40th anniversary of the event, which was begun around the peak of spring bird migration and involves counting every species seen. The total in NJ routinely goes over 200 species. As you can imagine, the event is HEAVILY influenced by weather, and yesterday saw the first good weather system in five years. (2020 saw snow in some areas!) Ideal is overnight southwesterly winds, since most songbirds migrate at night, with a light rain shower right at dawn to bring them down. Warm fronts from the southwest in spring have been very scarce these last years, but this stretch around May 5 has produced in northern Jersey! And more migration weather to come this week!

I was reading a cooking newsletter this morning that featured extracts from Frances Trollope (mother of novelist Anthony Trollope) about her observations on American cooking and dining habits in the late 1820s. It contained a passage about American sleigh-riding, which I thought might interest the snow-lovers in this forum: And I wondered, first, whether any of you have ever experienced an actual horse-drawn sleigh ride, and second, how deep, and what kind, of snow would be required to support a sleigh and horses.

Fun article in the NY Times today about meteorologists' largely unsuccessful attempts to beat back weather hyperbole: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/science/weather-forecasts-language.html 1st 10 articles per month are free, so should not be behind a paywall, yet.

Hearing people on TV trying to argue that Ian "should have" been a Category 5, and maybe they would then more would have heeded warnings. But I think it's important to reinforce the idea that hurricanes don't have to be "Cat 5" to be lethal, that lower designations are also dangerous. Ian will be an important example to be cited in the future.

If this is the "great weather" westerners claim for themselves, then they can keep it. I'd NEVER move to the southwest and experience this weather or worse, day after day. And yes, I know it's drier (although this has been pretty dry the last couple of days), but that just means fewer, if any, clouds, and no prospects of rain. If I didn't have rain every few days, and interesting clouds, and changeable weather, I'd sorely miss it. Who would want to retire to a place with weather like this? Ugh! [heat-driven rant over].

Well, the fate of this year's spring birding season is just about sealed. Tomorrow is the statewide World Series of Birding, and it's looking to be just as flat as the rest of this spring's migration has been. We needed several warm fronts with southerly, preferably southwesterly light overnight winds, and we didn't get them. One night of southerly winds, night of May 2, and it was followed by good numbers of arriving birds - but May 3 was rainy and very overcast, and the birds were not inclined to sing, and the lack of sun made most of them horribly backlit. You can actually see migration routes shifting inland. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's new "migration dashboard" - https://birdcast.info/ - is somehow able to use radar to give good estimates of overhead migration at night, and I could see birds dividing around New Castle County in Delaware and heading inland following the spine of the eastern Appalachian ridge rather than the coast. This has been the most recent of a number of consecutive years of poor spring migration in New Jersey, all due to rather relentless easterly and northeasterly winds, occasionally strong. There's fear the spring weather patterns are shifting for good.

While awaiting this coming storm, a really good tick-tock about how a lot of humans can cause a snowstorm to snowball into a crisis. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/01/27/i95-traffic-backup-winter-storm/ This was the epic emergency in Virginia and Washington in early January. Not our forum, but ... it couldn't happen here, right?

And Britain is getting the East Coast's winter - the tabloid Daily Mail's UK front page (not the US, the UK) is half full of stories on "Storm Ciara" which is blasting, with 90+ and 8+ mph winds, a story on surfers riding wages up a river, disruptions at airports. Here's one: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7988499/Britain-faces-fresh-SNOW-ice-warning-tonight-tomorrow.html They are already anticipating that this storm hitting now will be battering them this weekend.