East Coast hurricane birds

Many have been following the birds being found from Hurricane Irene recently, as it passes up the east coast (including comments from Fred Urie on the previous blogs, as some have notiecd!)

There's a great blog online now trying to follow all of the hurricane sightings:


http://hurricaneirene2011.blogspot.com/


Considering the way the wind spirals around the core of these tropical system, i'm of the mind that it's very unlikley we will see anything tropical from this storm. We experienced very strong NORTH winds on the west side of the system yesterday, which directs birds AWAY from us.. (especially tired seabirds, which would not fight the wind).. .

Seabirds are generally caught in the EYE of the storm, or blown in on the EAST/South-east side of the storm... Where powerful south to SE winds are pulling them up and inland. We need more of a track like hurricane connie to pull birds directly into Ontario.

:

Either way, it's still fun to hope for something. Often times with storms like these, the powerful weather on the WEST side of the storm (that we got) drops large numbers of arctic migrants like shorebirds/jaegers/arctic terns etc in places like ours. Probably why so many people reported great shorebirding around lake Ontario yesterday. The storm is just tooo big for them to fly over, and they're forced to stop early for us to see!


We'll just have to keep on hoping! TD 12 has formed off the cape verde islands. Will be at least a week before we really have a guess where it's headed:

http://www.nhc.noaa.gov/


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And if you need a little extra, check out this list of hurricane birds from an inland  reservoir in Virginia (1996, early sept:) checklist:

http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S7177009

Map of location:

http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&t=p&z=13&q=36.5708,-78.3451&ll=36.5708,-78.3451



Just imagine!


Still working on some James Bay stuff.. May still be a while... But i'm workin on it....