It’s one of those days when it looks nicer outside than it really is.   The wind is blowing hard from the north but the sun is out so the birds and squirrels are at my feeders. 

It’s a good day for staying indoors with a cup of hot chocolate.  I know this because I took a walk at Duck Hollow this morning.  It’s sheltered from the north so after seeing hundreds of gulls, some hooded mergansers and a lesser scaup I walked along the river trail. 

There I found a flock of cardinals, carolina chickadees and white-throated sparrows eating Oriental bittersweet berries.  This invasive plant seemed to be the only abundant bird food along the trail – except for the birds themselves.  A red-tailed hawk eventually caught one of them. 

I rounded the bend in the river.  Now the wind was in my face but there was a surprise overhead.  Two flocks of tundra swans flew over.  Woo hoo!

By then I was thoroughly cold so I hurried home for lunch and the comforts of home – and to look outside my window.

(photo by Kate St. John, taken from my back window)

After a long, long spate of beautiful weather we now have a drought.  The sunny days and clear cool nights I find so appealing have not produced any rain.  It’s another case of too much of a good thing.

Pittsburgh’s precipitation is 0.22″ below normal for August, but 1.62″ above normal for the calendar year.  

The statistics are deceiving.  The rain we’ve had has not fallen gently over the course of several hours.  Instead it arrives in huge, brief, torrential downpours that run off rapidly without soaking into the soil.

Of course this is hard on the crops, but I feel bad for the forest too.  Some of the trees have started to turn yellow already – notably the ash trees.  Others are dying, especially elms that are already under the stress of Dutch elm disease. 

Unlike ourselves, everything outdoors is completely at the mercy of the weather – even beautiful weather.

I hope it rains soon!

One of the benefits of watching birds is that I’ve gained an appreciation for clouds.  The beautiful ones are almost as ephemeral as birds, forming and dissipating in a matter of minutes.  I noticed this principle on Sunday at Lake Arthur.

It was a warm sunny day as I walked the trails along the lake shore.  Eventually the sound of the water and wind lulled me into sleepiness.  Hammock time!  But I didn’t have a hammock so I sat down on the grass.  Pretty soon I lay down and looked straight up.

A few birds caught my attention but the big attraction was the cloud layer that looked like a honeycomb, as shown here.

Cirrocumulus are the highest clouds.  Formed of ice crystals above 16,500 feet, they often have an iridescence that I can see with my polarized sunglasses.   Below them were a few altocumulus, mid-level clouds at 6,500 to 16,500 feet and one beautiful lenticular cloud, a lozenge in the sky.

If the altocumulus clouds had been thicker, they might have meant a weather system was approaching.  Instead, they broke up and floated away leaving a clear sky Sunday night with a bright, full moon.

Summer clouds make me happy.  I will try to remember this in November when Pittsburgh’s clouds blanket the sky.

(stock photo from Shutterstock)

Tornadoes and cyclones kill people, but did you know that merely lousy weather kills birds?

The past few weeks have been miserable here in Pittsburgh.  My cellphone picture from last Sunday tells it all.  It has rained nearly every day, sometimes it’s windy, always it’s cold.  It’s been bad for farmers and gardeners and anything that lives outdoors.

The birds who eat insects, such as chimney swifts and swallows, have taken it on the chin.  Insects hide from the cold so there’s less to eat, but that’s precisely when the birds need more food to maintain their body temperature.

I haven’t seen as many chimney swifts and swallows as I’d expect at this time of year.  The ones who haven’t arrived yet from the south are probably lucky.  It’s been so miserable that a flock of chimney swifts gave up for the day at 3:00pm last Wednesday.  I saw them spiral around a chimney and drop in to roost where they clung to the inside to wait out the cold.  I hope the chimney was not fed by a furnace.  We all had our furnaces on.

Bluebirds have suffered too.  They lay their first eggs in April and fledge their first brood in May, feeding them insects from the fields around their nests.  Len Hess reported on PABIRDS that 23 of out of 28 baby bluebirds died in the nest boxes he monitors in Westmoreland County.  The young birds were healthy and doing fine the previous week but the cold and rain spelled disaster.  The same was true for Fred Zahradnik’s bluebirds in the eastern part of the state where they experienced a nor’easter.

This morning there’s a break in the clouds.  Tomorrow the weather is supposed to change, bringing sun and temperatures in the 60s and 70s for the weekend.

Thank goodness for all our sakes!