Pellice

Last night, October 12-13, turned out to be by far the biggest night of bird migration this fall. (Most landbirds migrate at night). Weather conditions - clear sky, light northwest winds, were ideal. Cornell University's Birdcast estimated about 17 million birds crossed New Jersey during the night (alas, that doesn't mean they all land here). The UCAR radar site shows the overnight migration clearly. The first wave of our summer resident birds going south has already passed; these new birds are mostly our winter residents from the north - white-throated sparrows, juncos, yellow-rumped warblers. I saw my first string of migrating wild geese. It's been a fairly good fall migration, enough frontal passages reaching the coast to bring some waves of birds with them. That doesn't always happen, too often there are persistant east-northeast winds.

Aftermaths of hurricanes and tropical storms are intensely followed (literally) by birders checking for seabirds and tropical species somehow displaced by the storms. But flamingoes after Idalia! That was a new one! https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/03/flamingos-all-over-east-coast-post-idalia/70738375007/ gave some anecdotes from stunned birders, and Cornell University's Ornithology Lab had a more technical take on it: https://birdcast.info/news/in-the-pink-american-flamingo-madness-in-late-summer-2023/ Flamingoes are rare and difficult to see even in southernmost Florida, and not typically one of the displaced species. Much speculation about this widespread fallout to come.

Third season gardening. This upcoming hot week hurried me to get seeds in the ground for fall lettuces, spinach, and other greens, plus radishes and sweet turnips. Some I planted last week have sprouted nicely. Barring an early September frost (I remember September 9 one year!) I will have good pickings until December for these, and throughout winter, for a few things like the spinach, upland cress, and (especially) mache lettuce, aka corn salad, which grows all winter and is not one of the bitter greens, but a mild, pleasant, though small-leafed, green. I am trying a couple of varieties of truly cold-weather lettuces this year, from Germany and Austria, according to the seed companies. I have too much shade in my plot to grow a lot of the standard summer vegetables, though cherry tomatoes, pole beans, and cucumbers don't need too much. But in winter, with leaves gone and the sun at a low angle providing a lot of hours on my SE facing garden, there's a lot one can do to prolong the season. It's fun to try various things.

Was just out in the garden for an hour with the accompaniment of near constant thundering - but barely audible. It was at the lowest level of my awareness. At times I thought I was hearing airplanes. Is there some mechanism where a number of different, distant storms can produce this effect (nonstop barely audible thundering), or is a single storm cell capable of generating constant thunder for a long time? There certainly ought to be some Germanic term for this effect! I looked up "growling thunder" in German, which is "grollender Donner," which does give a good impression of the sound.

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?