UPDATE IN 2023: THIS USER LEFT TWITTER AND DELETED ALL CONTENT. ALAS. The cold eerie light of aurora borealis in Arctic Canada at Nunavut. (The dark blobs are clouds.)
Icy waterfall, Butler County (photo by Kate St. John)
24 January 2022
With lows last weekend in the single digits and many days colder than normal this month, is this winter cold enough to kill pests? Not necessarily.
Insects and ticks have evolved to survive a normal winter but are vulnerable to extremes. Some pests may be vulnerable this winter if they aren’t careful to hide.
Fleas are the least hardy insects on this list as they will die after 10 consecutive days at or below 37oF, which is actually above freezing. However …
Fleas avoid cold temperatures by spending winter in the fur of warm mammals including pet dogs and cats. Perhaps that’s why fleas seem so bad in the fall.
Spotted lanternfly adults die in winter but that’s no problem for this invasive insect. Before they die the females lay eggs to overwinter as the next generation.
According to Wikipedia, research last year at The State University of New Jersey suggests that -13oF is about the temperature at which all eggs die. At 5oF there is limited hatching but it depends on how long they were chilled and where they were kept. Pittsburgh has merely flirted with 0oF this winter, not enough to kill lanternfly eggs.
The Steller’s sea eagle in Maine was still near Boothbay Harbor on Tuesday 18 January 2022, as reported by @WanderingSTSE. The bird is 7,000 miles away from his native range and the only member of his species on the continent. What would his life be like if he was at home?
Steller’s sea eagles (Haliaeetus pelagicus) breed in Far Eastern Russia and migrate south for the winter but they don’t leave cold weather behind. One of their favorite winter locations is Hokkaido, Japan where floating ice provides a platform from which to fish. (Blue arrow points to Hokkaido.)
They are joined there by a smaller sea eagle, the white-tailed eagle (Haliaeetus albicilla) of Europe, Asia and western Greenland. White-tailed eagles are very similar to their closest relative, the bald eagle. All three are sea eagles in the genus Haliaeetus.
Snow depth on Craig St in Pittsburgh, 17 Jan 2022, 6:54am (photo by Kate St. John)
17 January 2022, 9am
A week ahead of today’s snowstorm the predictions were dire. By yesterday morning the forecast called for 6-12 inches in the Pittsburgh area beginning with wet snow on Sunday, possibly some freezing rain, ending on Monday at 1pm.
With that much warning and a national holiday, Martin Luther King Day, the streets are empty in Pittsburgh.
At 6:50am I found a windless place to measure the snow in my neighborhood, 5.75 inches shown above, and it is still snowing at 9am.
Here are more scenes before dawn.
Still snowing in Pittsburgh, lit by floodlight, 17 Jan 2022, 6:50am (photo by Kate St. John)
Maintenance crews were already out blowing, shoveling, salting and plowing to keep up with as many as 3 more inches.
The sky was white with snow but I could see lights in the distance.
Snowing in Pittsburgh, 17 Jan 2022, 6:48am (photo by Kate St. John)Snow in Oakland, 17 Jan 2022, 6:43am (photo by Kate St. John)
Allegheny National Forest at Beaver Meadows Recreation Area, 12 Jan 2022 (photo by Barb Griffith)
15 January 2022
The sun was shining and the temperature was in the mid 30s when six of us arrived at Beaver Meadows Recreation Area in the Allegheny National Forest on 12 Jan 2022. We were there to find 40 red crossbills (Loxia curvirostra) reported on 29 December. Just one perched in profile would be enough for me. I had to see the beak.
This one dragged his tail as he bounded across the path, planting his back feet in the prints of his front feet as he hurried from one subnivean hole to the next.
Likely the footprints of a white-footed mouse, Beaver Meadows, 12 Jan 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Since meadow voles have relatively short tails my guess is that the print was made by a white-footed mouse, (Peromyscus leucopus) pictured below. Notice the long tail.
Otters slid on lake ice near their den. A local man helped us with this ID and showed us a photo of the otters.
Red squirrels made small highways between trees.
Bobcat,
Snowshoe hare.
This was my first ever look at snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) tracks but I recognized the distinctive large hind feet that spread like “snowshoes” to help them walk on snow. (An optical illusion may make the footprints appear to bulge. My boot is at bottom of the photo for scale.)
Snowshoe hare track + tip of my boot, Beaver Meadow Recreation Area, Allegheny National Forest, 12 Jan 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Here are two sets of snowshoe hare prints, plain and marked up with notes. In the smaller track the hind feet are just less than 4″ long. In the larger the hind feet are about 6″ long.
Tracks of two snowshoe hares, Beaver Meadow Recreation Area, Allegheny National Forest, 12 Jan 2022 (photos by Kate St. John) Tracks of two snowshoe hares, Beaver Meadow Recreation Area, Allegheny National Forest, 12 Jan 2022 (photos and markup by Kate St. John)
And here’s the mammal that makes these prints. Snowshoe hares are active at night, dusk and dawn so of course we didn’t see any.
Ultimately we saw 10 species of birds, only 26 individuals, five of which were red crossbills. It was worth the trip for the snowshoe hares. Yes I did see a crossbill beak.
When I look up at the sun to estimate the time, I expect it to be noon when the sun is at its highest point. In Pittsburgh the sun’s highest point, called solar noon, is always later than clock noon and it varies. It’s 3 minutes after noon (12:03p) in early November, 34 minutes in early February (12:34p). The reason is explained by The Equation of Time and our location in the Eastern Time Zone.
The equation of time is the difference between time measured using a sundial, also known as true or apparent solar time, and time measured using a clock, also known as mean solar time. [mean is 24 hours] …
The length of a solar day [from solar noon to solar noon] is not exactly 24 hours long. It varies throughout the year because of the elliptical shape of Earth’s orbit and its axial tilt. It is longer than 24 hours around the summer and winter solstices and shorter than 24 hours around the spring (vernal) and fall (autumnal) equinoxes.
Earth’s eccentric orbit and axial tilt affect the location of the Sun as seen from Earth. If you take a photograph of the Sun at the same place and [Standard] time every day for a year its location varies in a lazy figure 8 called an analemma.
Beyond the analemma, solar noon in Pittsburgh is always later than clock noon because we are longitudinally more than halfway west inside the Eastern Time Zone. For instance today, 3 Jan 2022, solar noon is at:
11:37am in Bar Harbor, Maine
12:00pm in New York City
12:24pm in Pittsburgh and
12:49pm in Indianapolis.
A graph of the number of minutes solar noon occurs before/after clock noon always follows the same curve below, echoing the analemma. In this graph I have altered the Y axis to match Pittsburgh’s solar offset from Standard Time. The curve is always above zero because solar noon is always later than clock noon in Pittsburgh.
We’re having such a warm December that it may be mid January before we see ice again. When we do we are likely to see needle ice but it is too late for frost flowers.
Frost flowers, shown above, are beautiful, thin, curled ice confections that form in the presence of soggy unfrozen soil, freezing air, and dried plant stems that haven’t frozen yet. This week we have soggy soil and will eventually get freezing temperatures but all the plants have frozen at least once. The National Weather Service in Louisville, KY explains (paraphrased):
“Frost flowers are thin layers, perhaps credit card thickness, of ice that are extruded through slits from the stems of white or yellow wingstem plants, among others. … Practically speaking [this is] a once per year event, although not all individuals produce frost flowers on the first day of good conditions. The water in the plant’s stem is drawn upward by capillary action, expands as it freezes, splits the stem vertically, and freezes on contact with the air.”
Needle ice is much more common in western Pennsylvania because it bursts up from saturated soil into freezing air. It too is caused by capillary action but it is more hardy than frost flowers.
Needle ice (photo by Kate St. John)
We’ll likely have needle ice some time in January. This vintage article tells you where to look.
Sunset in Schenley Park, Michelmas 2021 (photo by Kate St. John)
21 December 2021
By the time the winter solstice arrives today at 10:59am we already will have gained three minutes at the end of the day.
Though the winter solstice has the shortest daylight — only 9 hours, 16 minutes and 57 seconds in Pittsburgh — it doesn’t have the earliest sunset nor the latest sunrise. That’s because the length of the solar day varies, solar noon to solar noon, while our clocks use the average day length of 24 hours. For a host of reasons, our clocks do not match solar time(*).
Thus the earliest sunset occurred 1 to 13 December in Pittsburgh and the latest sunrise won’t happen until 31 December and will linger for more than a week. See table below, built from information at timeanddate.com.
Pittsburgh PA Sunrise & Sunset near the Winter Solstice
Date
Sunrise
Sunset
1 Dec 2021 (earliest sunset) to 13 Dec 2021
7:24 am to 7:34 am
4:53 pm (earliest sunset)
21 Dec 2021 (winter solstice)
7:39 am ET
4:56 pm ET
31 Dec 2021 (latest sunrise) to 8 Jan 2022
7:43 am (latest sunrise)
5:03 pm to 5:10 pm
If you cue on sunrise the days will seem to get shorter into early January.
If you cue on sunset your day has already gained three minutes this month and is getting longer.
(*) For the ultimate in “Our clocks don’t match solar time” consider that Solar Noon happens around 1pm during Daylight Saving Time. Solar Noon is in the 12 o’clock hour, as it should be, during Standard Time.
