This site focuses on these questions


Sept 13: WHITE-TAILED TROPICBIRD found in CT on Aug 28th! Read this fascinating story at Greg's site....

SEPT 10: CURRENTLY WORKING WITH THE eBIRD TEAM TO GET ALL HURRICANE BIRDS INTO eBIRD. PLEASE ENTER YOUR STORM-BIRDS INTO eBIRD THIS WEEK, OR CONTACT ME (robben99@gmail.com) OR MARSHALL ILIFF TO ASSIST.

This Hurricane Irene blog was meant to be helpful for just ONE WEEK to provide REAL-TIME reporting of ALL Atlantic coast storm-birds DURING the "teeth" of the storm, but the storm's winds and flooding killed our electricity and this blog. Without electricity, water and internet for 102 hours prevented us reporting during the most exciting part of the hurricane and its birding aftermath.
Instead of trying to "catch-up" and reconstruct those 102 missing hours from the archived listserv reports, we will instead 1) summarize them, 2) learn what we can from this "experiment" in real-time-hurricane-bird-blogging, 3) request eBird data entry of all hurricane reports, and 4) get ready for the NEXT hurricane this year!

Therefore we will refocus on the latest current map of the NEXT hurricanes and their projected storm tracks.....
Tropical Storms and Hurricanes (and the wind speed probabilities map... Wind Speed Projections ) and prepare again to answer these questions....
What impacts will the next hurricane have on birds on the East Coast of the USA (plus the western Atlantic and maritime Canada)? And how will that be reflected on the twenty main internet bird lists covering that region?

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

Day #1 -- Introduction

UPDATE:  NO REPORTS OF ANY "HURRICANE BIRDS" YET AS OF 8/24 9PM

This site will provide daily links to internet nature reports related to Hurricane Irene 2011.  We know that hurricanes are very dangerous, damaging and costly. This site is NOT encouraging anybody to go out and endanger themselves to see birds or the storm itself. Even after the storm there can be dangers, such as electric wires on the wet ground. This site, however, will focus mostly on bird-related changes caused by this storm, including southern and tropical birds which may be blown north by the winds. We will monitor all the daily posts on the twenty East Coast bird lists from Florida up to Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. It will be interesting to see how this storm is reflected on these twenty birding lists.

Here is a snapshot of the estimated storm track as of 8pm August 24, 2011.....slightly to the east of the projected track last night....

Click to expand this image

There will be plenty of hurricane-related posts on the East Coast bird lists over the next 7 days, and here are the first several of them....click on the blue-colored links to jump to those posts, and then you can use your browser's "back button" to return to this site...

New Brunswick ... the first hurricane related post from New Brunswick, Canada

No hurricane posts from Maine yet.

No hurricane posts from Vermont yet.

No hurricane posts from New Hampshire yet.

The Massachusetts Birding List  Hurricane Irene could be very damaging

No hurricane posts from Rhode Island yet.

Connecticut Birds  Hurricane Irene appears to be aiming at us

No hurricane posts from New York yet.

No hurricane posts from New Jersey yet.

No hurricane posts from Delaware yet.

MDOsprey Birding List  Starting to think about the hurricane hitting Maryland

Virginia Birding  First post about the hurricane from Virginia

The Carolinas Birding List  No hurricane posts from the Carolinas yet.

Georgia Birding  Georgia is starting to think about the hurricane, as per this posting....

"Subject: Hurricane Irene Alert - 
Possible Storm-Blown Pelagic Birds - Maybe Friday through Sunday or so!
From: Mark McShane
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:20:01 -0400
Hi All,
Hurricane Irene bears watching and is slated to come up the Georgia coast
Friday and Saturday. Depending on the actual track of the storm we may get
some pelagic species storm-blown onto the Georgia coast and even inland
Friday-Sunday, or even later, as the birds collect themselves and
hopefully head back out to sea! ...
Also, here's a link to Lydia Thompson's interesting report of 8/22/2008
concerning storm-blown pelagic species on the Georgia coast then:
Coastal Georgia Birding: Hanging on by toenails
It's possible that some Georgia inland lakes may end up attracting and
holding storm-tossed pelagic species from this storm for a short while!"

Birdbrains ... some first hurricane thoughts from Florida


MORE TOMORROW!