Lessons Learned from this hurricane/birding experience

If anybody would like to start a discussion of what we have LEARNED as birders/naturalists from this Hurricane Irene experience we will be glad to host that discussion here, starting with anybody's proposed list of lessons-learned.

I will start with the #1 lesson I learned (and it goes beyond birding)... to get an electricity generator in my house, so we are really prepared for the next storm which shuts down our electricity for a day or maybe a week!

The next lesson might be that the "best" birds are reported during (and the hours right after) the teeth of the storm! Or maybe that is too much of a generalization.

Feel free to email me at robben99@gmail.com or leave a comment "below" this post (you probably have to first click on this post so it is the only post visible to you).  This discussion will start slowly, since I will not have much internet access this week, and I cant really get into the discussion until I do have electricity restored.
Thanks,  Tom

Possible uses of blogs like this one

A REAL-TIME TOOL:

The primary objective of this blog was to be used DURING Hurricane Irene,  as a real-time communication tool, FOR JUST ONE WEEK ending on 8/31, to be useful to east coast birders to be more aware of the birding effects/opportunities/locations of Hurricane Irene, DURING Irene's approach and its immediate aftermath. Unfortunately we had a power outage which started at 11am Sunday and continues now 5pm Tuesday, including the crucial hours of Irene's main landfall, so that objective was compromised. 

A HISTORICAL TOOL:

Now that the hurricane is gone, and its effects are evaporating, we will try to use this blog to do a brief historical summary of Irene, but already the storm reports on the various state listservs are "rolling-off", and some of them will be hard to recover. We have just started to take daily snapshots of the main listservs, hoping to use them to assemble a comprehensive picture of all the hurricane birds of the past week.

To see the "rolling-off" problem you can click on some of the older links in this blog, and you will NOT be taken back to those particular reports (even though those links have the exact listserv ID numbers for those reports), but rather to the latest subset of reports on that listserv (because the older ones rolled-off, unfortunately). So these listservs are most useful during their current week (before the reports roll-off), but not as useful after the roll-off of the latest batch of reports (some listservs do archive but some dont). Some of this history is not archived. More thoughts on this next week, but meanwhile we will try to assemble a summary of "Irene's Birds" (assuming electricity returns soon).