Struggling today

The Safari was pleased with the Brambling yesterday afternoon and really hopes the finch flock finds the seed we’ve put down and sticks around. Be good to see the Bramblings here all winter, not sure how many are present now but 4+ was the number reported about a week ago.

Today the wind was well and truly up and the Patch 2 experience a somewhat chilly windswept affair – think our wig is stuck on tree somewhere in Yorkshire! – The tide was out and a reasonable strandline had been left by the receding waters. A couple of dozen Oystercatchers and our best count of the season so far of Sanderlings, a mighty 17 of them...it’s still early days for the beach though. A fair number of uncounted Common Gulls were down there too...anyone fancy picking out a Mew Gull after the next trans-Atlantic depression has passed?

Note the new widget in the side bar showing the current ppm CO2 in our atmosphere. Up from 250ppm 23 years ago to 291 ppm now. OK 300ppm is a very small proportion - 1/3333th – and may not sound much but think of it like beer (or any other alcoholic drink). One litre of beer is a little under a kilogramme and so about 1% of our body weight but only 0.05% of the beer is alcohol so only 1/2000^th of my body weight is ‘active ingredient’ – Our physical mechanisms can cope with a litre of beer but add a little bit more and we begin to feel the consequences, continue adding the beer and well you can guess the rest...so to those who say there’s only a tiny amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and adding a tiny bit more won’t make any difference we say think again. 

Was ‘Super-storm’ Sandy a product of climate change? Don’t suppose we’ll know for a few years, we’ll have to wait and see if the frequency, track and intensity of hurricanes changes over the next few decades – by then of course New York (and other places) may well have been washed off the map.

We’ve never actually heard of a Superstorm before (neither has spellchecker :-) ) but here’s a definition stolen from an American who seems to know a bit about the weather systems over there from here

“Sandy was a tropical cyclone. It started out, as is typical, as a tropical depression. Then it strengthened to become a tropical storm. Then it strengthened to become a hurricane. Then it lost some of the defining characteristics of a hurricane and met up with other weather fronts, which caused it to lose the characteristics that defined it as a tropical cyclone and it became a subtropical cyclone -- another meteorological term used for storms with certain defined parameters.

Superstorm is a name attached to it as non-scientific reference to reflect that it was a big storm fed by multiple weather systems.”

So now you know what a Superstorm is...flippin wet by the look of it...maybe it’ll make some of those in financial power over there sit up and take note at what they might be causing...some chance they’ll keep saying all these events are just freak weather and nothing to do with a changing climate.

The blustery remains of Sandy are currently bringing blizzard conditions to central eastern Canada it will eventually fizzle out there without bringing any whoopy-dooo North American birds our way.

No chance of a lunchtime seawatch today as algal foam was being blown over the top of our office building and onto the green at the back! This is nothing to do with Sandy and is just normal Blackpool Illuminations windy weekend weather.

So we had a brief watch of the new work feeder were a small flock of Starlings, a single House Sparrow and a really camera-shy Robin but no Blue Tits.

Not a Blue Tit in sight

 

 

Where to next? Not sure what the weekend might bring.

In the meantime let us know if the weather allowed observations in your outback.