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Fall migration
Oct. 8th, 2007 11:59 pm
Currently at Toronto Pearson: 21. High today: 32, which, whatever it comes in at precisely, will blow away the old October record. It was interestingly hot today (in the same sort of way that, when I ripped my hamstring a few weeks ago, it was interestingly painful. People would ask me, how's it feel?, and I'd say, it hurts!, and they'd be like sympathetic, and I just found it very interesting.) It's never interestingly hot in October. It's never even interestingly hot in September. It's confusing the trees. Some of them started turning in the middle of August from water stress; some of them won't be done dropping their leaves until November. There are also a lot more bugs around than usual. Wasps, dragonflies, garden spiders, all still going strong (and costing the Yankees the ALDS).
This despite the fact that yesterday's high came in about twelve degrees below the 30 forecast going into the weekend. The warm front that moved up on Friday backed down again from the northeast yesterday, which is something that doesn't happen around here much, before moving back up last night--currently lying, sharply defined on the radar, somewhere between Kingston, where the dewpoints were between 16 and 19 today, and Ottawa, where the dewpoints were between 8 and 12. La Niña, doncha know. On Friday, there was a dotted line of thunderstorms across south-central Ontario that looked for all the world like they were caused by lake-breeze convergence; the CBC weather gerbil said they were "coming in ahead of the front". The same CBC weather gerbil said on Thursday that some fog that suddenly appeared in the city that morning, a while after sunrise, formed due to the sun evaporating enough additional moisture to tip the air past the dewpoint, which sounds to me like a nice try (though you'd have to do some more explaining to explain why that happened at that particular time, as opposed to what usually happens, which is that the sun "burns off" the fog), but I'm pretty sure that what actually happened was that the sun heated the land enough to start up a lake breeze, which brought the fog, which had already formed over the lake, with it in over the land. (Poking around on this led me to this guy's site, which confirmed that significant lake breezes can develop even in October when the water should be at its warmest relative to the land, in part because the temperature of the air over the water can be significantly cooler than the water itself--which makes sense, in that there's negligible thermal radiation coming back off the water from the sunlight; the water doesn't need to cool the air, it just needs to not heat it. No significant lake breezes today, though; it hit 30 a couple of times at Toronto Island.)
But the birds, nonetheless, are moving on through. L.'s father refilled the bird feeders yesterday, after they were neglected for most of the summer, and the following passed through the interestingly hot backyard today: blue jays (too big for the feeders), a cardinal (also too big for the feeders, but picked scraps off the ground), dark-eyed juncoes (not interested in the feeders; picked stuff off the ground in and around the garden), a hairy woodpecker (interested only in suet), red-breasted nuthatches (the frenetic stars of the show, interested in chasing the other birds away from whatever the other birds are interested in, but mostly interested in picking stuff out of the mixed seed until they hit peanut, and in dropping sunflower seeds on the deck until they found one they liked), chickadees (zeroed in on sunflower seeds, which they'd take off to a tree branch to peck at them between their toes), house sparrows (only interested in the grass seeds in the mixed seeds), house finches (mostly interested in nyjer seeds, but ate a few sunflower seeds), goldfinches (daintily nibbled on nyjer seeds; due to their appearance we learned that boy goldfinches turn into girls for the winter, like mallards), a red-winged blackbird (just passing through), and an unidentified stripey-headed sparrow (which hopped around on the ground).
My guess, looking at the Audobon Field Guide now, is that the unidentified sparrow was a song sparrow, of which Audobon says: "Probably the best known of our native sparrows, it is found almost everywhere in North America." As far as I'm concerned, if this bird today was a song sparrow, it may have been the first one I've seen in my life. But you miss a lot of stuff when you're not paying attention.
Speaking of missing stuff when you're not paying attention, I've been re-reading the Republic, the last few days, to pick out the bits to go in my course reader for Human Nature 2.0 next term. The second (the very second) sentence, I picked up something I'd never picked up before: Socrates is coming back from the feast for an alien god, Bendis, recently imported to Athens from Thrace. The fact that Socrates is coming back from a religious festival is (I guess) commonly commented on as evidence of his piety. But that it's for a naturalized alien god is important, both because Socrates is accused at his trial of denying the gods of the city and introducing new gods, and because the fellow/alien distinction (or dialectic) is a running subtext in the Republic.
It's very difficult reading the Republic for something like this now; every time I read it, it's slower, because there's more there. One cute thing I've noticed this time: it's Glaucon who objects to the austerity of the "city of pigs", the city as Socrates first sets out to describe it, and it's Glaucon who is seduced by Socrates into agreeing to the austerity to be imposed on the guardians in the "city with a fever".
This despite the fact that yesterday's high came in about twelve degrees below the 30 forecast going into the weekend. The warm front that moved up on Friday backed down again from the northeast yesterday, which is something that doesn't happen around here much, before moving back up last night--currently lying, sharply defined on the radar, somewhere between Kingston, where the dewpoints were between 16 and 19 today, and Ottawa, where the dewpoints were between 8 and 12. La Niña, doncha know. On Friday, there was a dotted line of thunderstorms across south-central Ontario that looked for all the world like they were caused by lake-breeze convergence; the CBC weather gerbil said they were "coming in ahead of the front". The same CBC weather gerbil said on Thursday that some fog that suddenly appeared in the city that morning, a while after sunrise, formed due to the sun evaporating enough additional moisture to tip the air past the dewpoint, which sounds to me like a nice try (though you'd have to do some more explaining to explain why that happened at that particular time, as opposed to what usually happens, which is that the sun "burns off" the fog), but I'm pretty sure that what actually happened was that the sun heated the land enough to start up a lake breeze, which brought the fog, which had already formed over the lake, with it in over the land. (Poking around on this led me to this guy's site, which confirmed that significant lake breezes can develop even in October when the water should be at its warmest relative to the land, in part because the temperature of the air over the water can be significantly cooler than the water itself--which makes sense, in that there's negligible thermal radiation coming back off the water from the sunlight; the water doesn't need to cool the air, it just needs to not heat it. No significant lake breezes today, though; it hit 30 a couple of times at Toronto Island.)
But the birds, nonetheless, are moving on through. L.'s father refilled the bird feeders yesterday, after they were neglected for most of the summer, and the following passed through the interestingly hot backyard today: blue jays (too big for the feeders), a cardinal (also too big for the feeders, but picked scraps off the ground), dark-eyed juncoes (not interested in the feeders; picked stuff off the ground in and around the garden), a hairy woodpecker (interested only in suet), red-breasted nuthatches (the frenetic stars of the show, interested in chasing the other birds away from whatever the other birds are interested in, but mostly interested in picking stuff out of the mixed seed until they hit peanut, and in dropping sunflower seeds on the deck until they found one they liked), chickadees (zeroed in on sunflower seeds, which they'd take off to a tree branch to peck at them between their toes), house sparrows (only interested in the grass seeds in the mixed seeds), house finches (mostly interested in nyjer seeds, but ate a few sunflower seeds), goldfinches (daintily nibbled on nyjer seeds; due to their appearance we learned that boy goldfinches turn into girls for the winter, like mallards), a red-winged blackbird (just passing through), and an unidentified stripey-headed sparrow (which hopped around on the ground).
My guess, looking at the Audobon Field Guide now, is that the unidentified sparrow was a song sparrow, of which Audobon says: "Probably the best known of our native sparrows, it is found almost everywhere in North America." As far as I'm concerned, if this bird today was a song sparrow, it may have been the first one I've seen in my life. But you miss a lot of stuff when you're not paying attention.
Speaking of missing stuff when you're not paying attention, I've been re-reading the Republic, the last few days, to pick out the bits to go in my course reader for Human Nature 2.0 next term. The second (the very second) sentence, I picked up something I'd never picked up before: Socrates is coming back from the feast for an alien god, Bendis, recently imported to Athens from Thrace. The fact that Socrates is coming back from a religious festival is (I guess) commonly commented on as evidence of his piety. But that it's for a naturalized alien god is important, both because Socrates is accused at his trial of denying the gods of the city and introducing new gods, and because the fellow/alien distinction (or dialectic) is a running subtext in the Republic.
It's very difficult reading the Republic for something like this now; every time I read it, it's slower, because there's more there. One cute thing I've noticed this time: it's Glaucon who objects to the austerity of the "city of pigs", the city as Socrates first sets out to describe it, and it's Glaucon who is seduced by Socrates into agreeing to the austerity to be imposed on the guardians in the "city with a fever".
