Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Major cold front

Thought this was another ex wives thread.

Yep. They've been hyping the living crap out of the cold front here. Dropped the temp all of 16° today - 99° yesterday. Big friggen' whoop, but I'll take it.

Heard some snows passing over around 1am here in the SacJoaquin Delta.

Beautiful early fall day here in Iowa.

It's a welcome change here. It was 92° on Saturday, 84 yesterday... high today was 58.

. double post

54 degrees and raining

Going down to 45 tonight, calling for a high of 50 tomorrow, with rain. Sucks that the Beaners are killing the Hummers, we should just go to war with them.

Not so much a need to rest, they don’t seem to need sleep the same way mammals do. Most songbirds migrate at night, presumably to reduce risk from hawks and falcons but also because it leaves the day free for refueling. For birds it’s all about body fat, they’ve figured out a songbird gets about 125 miles per gram of fat and they can lay on fat and burn it off equally quick.

Swallows and swifts migrate by day because they can feed as they fly. Robins gather up in wandering flocks in search of berries and migrate by day in the fall, dunno about the spring.

Other birds like waterfowl migrate both day and night.

Hummingbirds are believed to migrate mostly in daylight, just over the treetops so they can stop when they come across flowers. Yet they have been observed flying up and out of sight late afternoon. Those leaving the Gulf Coast in fall usually depart in the morning tho they prob’ly won’t make landfall on the Yucatán until the early hours of they following morning.

If they make it. Bird’s respiratory systems are so efficient they generally don’t fatigue like we do (pheasants, grouse and turkeys tire because of the white meat in their flight muscles) birds burn off all their fat and if they still ain’t made landfall they burn muscle until they become too weak to fly, this can happen inside 24 hours dependent upon the fat load at the start.

Blackpoll warblers, the size of a sparrow, are famous, because they fatten up on berries in New England before making a 72 hour nonstop flight over water to Brazil. The record is held by a pigeon-sized shorebird the leaves the Aleutians and shows up in New Zealand after a seven-day overwater flight,they can’t swim either.

Great info. That’s crazy that a warbler can fly from New England to Brazil in three days.

High tomorrow is 73, low is 46. Gonna feel wonderful! About darn time!

Interesting thread, Birdwatcher. Thanks for starting.

Do you have any experiences with the dates of the past years when migration starts/started. Are there years when the bird start to migrate earlier or later in the U.S. and Canada?

There have been a bunch of people at the Sabine Woods.

The general trend is earlier, at least in the spring. The time of return follows a bell curve, especially in songbirds where timing and direction of migration appears to be mostly genetic in origin.

Come back too early and you prob’ly die, and get removed from the gene pool. Come back too late and the best territories are taken and/or your young don’t have time to mature and put on enough fat for their own fall migration so the genes die with their young also.

Always a crap shoot, but always enough variation that it happens every year and a subset of the population is doomed to fail. In a warming climate those that get here somewhat earlier have an advantage and leave the most offspring which likewise tend to return early. Climate cools and the opposite happens.

So it’s a self-adjusting system, regulated by the death of the losers.

There were some white pelicans on Galveston Bay today. It's pretty early for that.

Three billion fall migrants coming south, peaking about now. There will be a boatload of stuff piling up on the Gulf Coast preparatory to tackling the Gulf.

Prob’ly some rare birds there too. I should check ebird
but I ain’t much of a twitcher.

Pretty cool in camp a couple days ago. The flexible water jug like
THIS ONE
hanging on the tree, was frozen about half solid. Two nalgene bottles were frozen completely solid.

Forecast for town was 25* but could not have been higher than 15* to freeze that much water. Have had that jug’s valve freeze in October, but this was 2.5 gallons of water into solid ice.

Fun sleeping on the ground.