I find myself with a spare hour before I have to catch a plane! 98% of June blog material (right into July) is pre-written and scheduled to post itself.... But I couldn't resist talking about a few things I've been following recently!
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Shorebirds are moving south! Started even before the last cold front... There are a surprising number of Late June/very early July records of Ruff...
Need proof? Here's an adult female Ruff (Reeve) my Dad and I found in September several years ago.......
Remember when I rabbled about the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation) for most of the winter and spring? And how it was really positive most of the winter, and we had wicked winds/storms and sweet vagrants even in the worst possible time? (Late Winter)..
And then how it pretty much died come spring vagrant season and we had a fairly poor rarity May?
Well as of today, it is still negative, and forecast to go even lower.............. There are a huge number of weather factors that can bring us rarities, but it looks like the NAO is NOT going to be helping anytime soon...
Remember last summer when I rabbled about how hopefully the MEGA drought in Texas would bring us some cool herons etc? Well it didn't happen....
Why? Well my guess is that it was way TOO wet in the US Midwest... IF anything left texas, it never got anywhere near us due to the heavy rains in places like southern IL, TN, KY etc...
But what about the summer of 2012?
DROUGHT baby... FInally starting to approach SW Ontartio from the US midwest..... This is going to be an awesome learning experience to see what sort of things happen in July and August (if it holds)... Clearly it has already brought a good number of things like Dickcissels...
Fingers crossed for some fun birds (I'm still banking on Little Blue Herons).... But with the drought hitting hardest in the northern Mississippi River area (Southern IL) maybe we COULD (I repeat, could) have a slight chance at something better like a Least Tern or Anhinga (or something stupid like Limpkin)...
Clearly I'm stretching here, but it is going to be fun to watch how it unfolds...
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Tropical Storm Debby:
It is being "sheared" and hampered by dry air, which has largely exposed the centre of the storm (seen above, the thicker clouds are greatly displaced from the centre to the E, NE and N), but is quite large....
It is wobbling around in the gulf, and has been one of the most confusing storms for the experts to "predict a path" for in a long time... Here's the major global forecast models as of this morning:
Those are THEE BEST weather models in the world, trying to predict where the storm is going to travel..... Typically they all follow a similar route, but clearly there are some major difficulties in predicting this one.... How does the National Hurricane Centre (USA) try to tell people to prepare for a major storm like this? When the models have most of the US gulf states as possible targets?
Kind of fun to watch and see how it plays out... I check the NOAA page:
And Jeff Masters Blog (for both the posts and comments, but beware the comment section):
- unfortunatley no matter how this plays out, it is very very unlikley that we will get to enjoy and weather or bird related fun.......
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Butterflies???
I predicted last week would bring some more rare leps to Ontario, and people at Pelee were happy to oblige by finding awesome species like White-M Hairstreak, Cloudless Sulphur and Hoarce's Duskywing... The winds sort of died early, so it's not totally suprising to me that it wasn't a major major event, but those are some really awesome sightings...
Now I'm just waiting another few weeks until I can get some spare time to go out and look for myself again !!! Zebra Swallowtail and White-M Hairstreak are extremley high on my lep wish-list......
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Ok I think I'm good for now........
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