The big blue circles that appear quickly are absolutely ducting effects in general. But the bird signal tends to be buried in that noise because they aren't usually flying all that high off the ground and also because they roost at night and take off in the morning when the inversions are most pronounced. The reflectivity levels they produce are often pretty low because even though they are solid with a decent cross-section there aren't all that many of them (usually) in a volume of air compared to say droplets in moderate rain. Close to the radar where the measured volume sizes are smaller they'll be brighter. Also, the correlation coefficient is lower compared to rain based on the random orientation of their wings and asymmetric shape.
Anyway I've met those guys and a few times I did get the sense that they were mistaking radar artifacts for birds but that would be the data in which you'd be looking for birds.
Awesome day up your way, fair amount of fog shifting around run to run but super chill with a good bunch of peeps. Hayride skiers right might have been my fave
The UMass X band has been performing great of late after some upgrades. Nice to have some high res looks at convection again, this far from Nexrad. You can see the shear tightening up just west of Noho. Doubt this amounted to anything but still cool.
Was full on spring the last 24 hours, birds chirping, crocus and hellebores popping along with the dews, an altogether different smell out there. Was nice.
Anyway sun's gone. We cloudy
Hard pass on a 16+hr drive to chase linear mode low topped thunderstorms with fast moving embedded tornadoes. If you even see one you're probably too close.
But take the drive out if it and of course