Here in Maple Grove it feels like a royal buffet has been prepared and served but only the locals and a rare few celebrities are showing up to dine. Very few warblers and other birds - even summer residents.
I have relatives in Oklahoma and they have been caught in a series of jet stream, wet and dry, warm and cold frontal battles for almost three weeks - especially intensifying over the last two weeks. They have been pounded by softball size hail twice in the last week and been chain-sawed by tornadoes for the last three weeks - again more intensely over the last week. Plus there is another series developing over Arizona and New Mexico that are already putting Oklahoma on Level 5 alert. This is even unusual for Oklahoma where I lived for 20 years and chased the storms and prized my encounters with the twisters and meso-cyclones. I am thinking the weather is having a direct impact on our bird migration. I was noticing also that the weather is even unusual in the Gulf as projected winds driving the oil spill onto shore have been unusually absent resulting in the spill being kept out to sea. I'm not giving up. The warblers are coming! The warblers are coming! They are just waiting for the door to open without blowing them backwards. Thomas Maiello Angel Environmental Management, Inc. Maple Grove, MN ---- Join or Leave mou-net: http://lists.umn.edu/cgi-bin/wa?SUBED1=mou-net Archives: http://lists.umn.edu/archives/mou-net.html
