Sunday March 13, 2016 - Notes

  Some Weather / Nature / Bird Notes for Mid-February through this Weekend.

  Daylight Saving Time started during the predawn hours today. I could write a very long rant about how much I despise this useless time change, and how I feel about this area being in the wrong time zone, but I'll save that for some other time. The result is that the daylight hours seem to have been artificially set back. On Saturday the 12th, sunrise took place at 7:00 AM and sunset was at 6:49 PM. Today those times have been backed up to 7:58 AM and 7:50 PM, respectively.

  It was a very rainy night, and from dawn through noon we had overcast skies, periods of light rain and drizzle, and some pretty dense fog that slowly lifted (though the air was still misty). The overnight rain combined with the wet weather we've had since Thursday last week has absolutely saturated the ground in and around my neighborhood. Fields all around Franklin Township are flooded with large areas of standing water. My back yard also has small puddles here and there and I was sinking into soft mud with almost every step I took while I was outside at noon filling up my bird feeders. Feather Run is full of water to its banks, a foot or more deep in places, with a fairly strong current. I took a couple of photos of it with my cell phone right around noon today. The banks of the creek are looking pretty empty these days, with almost all the old Cattails from last year bent and broken from the winter winds and weather, and no new shoots visible yet.

  I should note that there have been some signs of new spring growth lately. I first noticed the Daffodils had sprouted up three weekends ago on Saturday, February 20, near the door of the backyard shed. At the time the shoots were just two or three inches high, and the unusually warm weather we'd had that weekend had probably accelerated that growth. A couple of bouts of colder (even snowy) weather over the next two weeks had slowed the growth down again, but the mild rainy spell that set in all through last week had resulted in more growth. Today, some of those plants were showing flowers, though they hadn't quite opened yet. Here's another photo from around noon today:

  In addition, today, for the first time, I saw the first sprouts of Tiger Lilies near the shed and along the north side of the house. Some of these are visible on the left side of the photo above. There were a few blooming Dandelions in the back yard today, but I've actually seen these off and on throughout the winter during thaws (I even found a couple blooming on New Year's Day, following what had been a mild and rainy week of weather to close out 2015!)

  The buds on the Red Maple Tree in the back yard have been getting noticeably larger for the last few weeks, but over this past week they've really gotten showy from a distance. Now they're up to half an inch long and look like dark red clusters on every branch. I tried to take photos of them today, again around noon, without much luck. My cell phone camera really didn't get them into focus well. But I'll include the best shot here:

  Besides the Maple Tree, most of the trees and bushes are still bare. A few are starting to show swollen buds. The grass is just starting to look greener but the yards are a mess of old leaves from last fall and twigs and branches from winter storms (winds, some snow, and lots of rainfall). It's going to be a real project to clean them up before I have to do any mowing! And that day might be coming much sooner than we think, if we continue to have a wet and mild early spring!

  I haven't kept very organized notes so far this year, and I might try to make a better summary of this winter we've just been through sometime soon, but I'd like to summarize some recent events here along with some notes about what I've been able to see around the area so far...

  The last really "big" snow event we had was four weeks ago today on Sunday, February 14. That afternoon we received about 2.5" of new wet snow cover, and about 3" lay on the ground. I'm using the word "big" here in a relative way; this was such a mild winter that this was actually the thickest snow cover we had on the Indianapolis Southeast Side! However, the week that followed featured a slow warming trend. Before the week was up, we had no snow cover left at all, and Saturday, February 20 turned out to be an incredibly warm day with a high of 72°F and a lot of sunshine! It was an unreal change in just one week.

  Lots of memorable "firsts" happened on February 20. I saw the first Red-Winged Blackbirds of the year; one was perched on one of my sunflower seed feeders by the patio at noon, and I heard others calling all around the neighborhood. They've become very common over the following three weeks, though, as of today, I still haven't seen any females.

  That same day, I also spotted up to 100 Sandhill Cranes flying high to the west, heading south to north in several groups. As usual, I heard these birds before I actually saw them! I heard more on the following Monday and then during the last weekend of February, though I haven't seen them so far in March. (I need to stress, of course, that I've been away from home a lot in the last few weeks, because of my work schedule!)

  That evening, I also heard the first Killdeer somewhere in the neighborhood after sunset. I've heard them occasionally since then, both here and around the Honda plant in Greensburg.

  The following day, on Sunday, February 21, I spotted the first Grackles of the year in the back yard. Since then, these birds have become very common and they've actually been kind of a nuisance over the last week. When they (and, Starlings and some Red-Winged Blackbirds) descend into my seed and suet feeders out in the back yard, they pretty much eat everything!

  Robins have become much more common than before over the last few weeks, and especially this past week. They never really left the area; I saw them in the neighborhood every month last winter. But now I see them and hear their calls, and they fill the outdoors with song before the start of dawn (this is something I just noticed over the past week.)

  Wintry weather wasn't quite over and done with after that unreal, spring-like weekend in late February. In fact, just days after this, we were threatened with the possibility of a bad winter storm as a strong low-pressure system tracked right through Indiana. As it turned out, Indianapolis was right on the edge of the worst weather. The system came through on Wednesday afternoon February 24 through Thursday morning February 25, and there were Winter Storm Warnings and even Blizzard Warnings for Western and Northern Indiana, where over six inches of snow fell, and there was a Winter Weather Advisory for Marion County and counties to our West and North. (The Advisory didn't extend to Johnson County, Shelby County, or Decatur County.) We ended up mainly receiving rain, though wet snow fell here during the predawn hours on Thursday. About an inch or more accumulated on grassy areas, but streets remained mostly wet. We really dodged the bullet with this storm. By the weekend the last traces of this snowfall had disappeared from the ground as much milder and very windy weather moved in.

  After a milder weekend on Saturday, February 27 and Sunday, February 28, another low-pressure system moved through the area and brought us more snow chances. No Winter Weather Advisories were in place this time, but local meteorologists predicted some travel concerns with this new system. The key, for us, was that temperatures were supposed to remain mild enough for most of the precipitation to fall as rain, and this is pretty much what happened. I did see some snow flurries falling before dawn on Wednesday, March 2, and then lots of wet snow before dawn on Thursday, March 3. The latter snow event put a little 1" of accumulation on grassy surfaces, but streets remained mostly wet (I did see some snow stick to side streets, parking lots, and our neighborhood streets before parking the car at home from my trip from work.) Any snow that stuck to the ground was gone by Thursday afternoon. This might (and I stress ... might) be the last snow accumulation that we see this winter; a winter that had us far below normal in snowfall already. And, as of this writing, Friday evening March 4 was the last time that we've reached a low temperature at or below the freezing point. We've been above freezing, and sometimes far above it, for the last nine days! (This probably isn't the total end of subfreezing temperatures, of course.)

  Since those first days of March, a lot of mild and rainy weather has moved through Indianapolis, and this continued up through today. The change has brought a few more "firsts of spring." When I was leaving work after midnight on the morning of Tuesday, March 8, I heard the sounds of Chorus Frogs coming from the ponds around the Honda plant.(I believe that these are the frogs that make a sound like a finger running along the teeth of an old metal comb.) During a drive with Adrian late on Thursday evening, March 10, I heard some more of these while we were on Combs Road between Main Street and County Line Road, and we also heard a few Spring Peepers. So the frogs are starting to wake up and come to life with this streak of mild air!

  As far as birds, when my feeders have been full, I've still been getting a lot of the usual bird species to come and visit the back yard over the last week. They do have to compete with the larger blackbirds much more than they did a month ago, naturally, but I still get a dozen or more House Sparrows, House Finches, and Goldfinches visiting. As of Thursday, March 10, I still had several (Slate-Colored) Juncos pecking around on the ground. These don't seem to be appearing in the numbers that I saw them last month, so they might be starting to migrate north. Occasionally I see Cardinals, White-Breasted Nuthatches, Downy Woodpeckers, Carolina Wrens, Carolina Chickadees, and Mourning Doves out there. (I haven't seen the Red-Bellied Woodpeckers around the back yard lately, but this might be because of that increased competition at the suet feeders.)

  After that summary, I'd like to make a few last notes about today (Sunday, March 13). Clouds started to break up late in the afternoon and we actually had a lot of sunshine. We also had high clouds and some really scenic low clouds through the rest of the day. Winds picked up a little and it was very mild.

  One final note ... I was outside in the back yard around 8:10 PM today (twenty minutes after sunset when it was starting to get dark) and I was amazed to see a Little Brown Bat fluttering over our house! I'm sure this is what it was because I had several good looks at it. I'm not sure that I've ever seen one out and about this early in the spring!
 
  We're in those earliest spring days, when changes are just starting to happen with momentum. There will be much more to write into this blog soon, whenever I have the time to summarize it all.