Mostly sunny, chilly and breezy.

Yesterday’s 50+ temperatures felt like a distant memory with gusty north winds keeping temperatures in the 30s. The official high will be 39F, but as I was out this afternoon, my car’s thermometer showed temps at 36F and down to 33F, depending on where I was.

View from Halibut Point Road

This weather pattern is basically a winter outflow event. If it were happening earlier in the year, we would be lucky to see highs above freezing, and lows could drop down into single digits. On the plus side, despite the wintry weather pattern, the strong April sun felt warm in those moments between chilling gusts.

This rat tried a couple of times to climb the feeder, but I didn't see it have success getting in while I watched.

A couple of young rats did their best impressions of squirrels trying to get to the bird feeder. I’m thinking they were young because of their size and lack of wariness. They spent a fair amount of time out in the open over a couple of hours, at least.

The way the rat climbed around on branches reminded me of a squirrel.

I don’t remember seeing rats climb around on branches before, but these were up in the honeysuckle, on branches sticking out from the brush pile, and even climbed a tree at least once.

I saw this Peregrine Falcon for only about 5 seconds as it flew across in front of me while I walked old airport road

I walked old airport road this afternoon. I had a brief (~5 second) look at a Peregrine Falcon flyby. Thanks to the marvels of modern autofocus, I was able to get pictures. Otherwise I would have known it was a falcon, but guessed it was a Merlin (it didn’t seem that large to me – but it can be hard to tell sometimes).

Plentiful white caps grace the waters between the channel and Magic Island

The wind was raising whitecaps from north of the channel breakwater out to Katlian. I drove out to Starrigavan and saw a couple of big gusts hitting the water, but not consistently enough that I could get photos.

My first of season Northern Pintail

This evening Connor let me know there were Northern Pintails down in front of the visitor center at the park. Since I hadn’t seen any yet this year, I went down to get a look. With the pintails and the falcon, my year total is up to 88 species, four ahead of last year’s pace. That’s all well and good for this time of year, but the difference maker in the end will be how many unusual species show up. Last year was a good year for species that don’t get reported most years, more than making up for the handful of regular occuring species I didn’t happen to see. After my stop by the park, I checked out Silver Bay. The wind was gusting, but not nearly as strong as it seemed to be out of Katlian Bay.

I worked on gaining a better sense of the Radula species we have around here. They’re liverworts, and only three species are known from the area. It looks like in many (maybe most) cases they should be relatively easy to recognize. I’m pretty sure I’ve already observed all three, though I hadn’t previously had names on most of my observations.

Dandelions blooming across from Sealing Cove parking lot are the first I’ve seen this year.

My iNaturalist Observations for Today

The post Winter’s Encore first appeared on Sitka Nature.