Avoiding Bad Weather

NOAA Doppler radar, national mosaic, 7 Sept 2016, 5:18am EDT (image from weather.gov)
NOAA Doppler radar, national mosaic, 7 Sept 2016, 5:18am EDT (image from weather.gov)

While traveling in Maine I kept in touch with home by reading the bird sightings on PABIRDS.  It was torture.  All the good warblers were in Pennsylvania, none in Maine.

Though Tropical Storm Hermine never made it to the Gulf of Maine it affected the weather from afar.  While Hermine spun itself out off the coast of New Jersey migrating birds avoided the northeast.

In the Doppler radar mosaic before dawn on Wednesday morning, Sept 7, you can see migrating birds as swaths of pale blue traveling through Illinois, Indiana and Kentucky to the coast of Georgia. The entire northeast is blank.

Now that I’m heading home the wind is about to change in Maine and birding will be good again.

Alas. The birds avoided bad weather but I could not.

 

(radar mosaic map from weather.gov)

4 thoughts on “Avoiding Bad Weather

  1. Some birds in the Gulf of California could not avoid Hurricane Newton. Many seabirds were swept up by the hurricane, and deposited in southern Arizona, most in the Tucson area, and one reported as far away as Phoenix. On September 7, 2016, Arizona added a few species to its state list, including a few species of Storm Petrels. Unfortunately, these sea birds are not equipped to survive in the desert, and if they don’t make their way back to the ocean, they will die if they are not rescued.

    http://blog.aba.org/2016/09/abarare-juan-fernandez-petrel-wedge-tailed-shearwater-others-arizona.html

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