Bird Songs and Wind Shear

Vero Beach
N 27 39.60 W 080 22.24

This morning I got up at dawn and rowed in to the marina for an early morning shower. It is a lovely day.

When I got ashore, I was struck by the beautiful and numerous songs of the birds. I have had it on my list to write a blog about the lack of song birds here in the south. Last year at Cumberland Island where we saw wild horses and armadillos, Libby and I were struck by the absence of song birds. Again, in the McKee Botanical Garden in Vero Beach, we were in a lovely place, but it was totally devoid of birds singing. In the Bahamas, we heard song birds, it seemed to be a mystery why they aren't here. Well, at least I'm glad to be proven wrong. There are wonderful song birds here. Perhaps the mystery is that they don't sing in the heat of midday. Does anybody know?

Rowing back to the boat I watched the sky. It is very lovely this morning, deep blue and decorated with high cirrus clouds. Cirrus clouds are made of ice crystals at very high altitudes. They tend to form in tendrils. Today I could see three layers of cirrus clouds. The lowest and highest layers, were being blown to the east. The middle layer was being blown to the west. That is clear visual evidence of vertical wind shear. In the northeast, such vertical wind shear is usually associated with very high velocity winds aloft and is often marked by standing lenticular clouds. Today in Vero, the winds aloft did not appear strong, just sheared in to layers.

I made a neat discovery rowing back to the boat. The wind was gusting to 25 knots coming from astern of the dinghy. I had trouble steering because the wind would blow on the dinghy transom and slew the boat to one side or the other. I discovered that if I turned the boat around and rowed backward, then I could keep the bow up in to the wind and it was much easier to steer. Speed and difficulty of rowing is no problem when the wind is blowing with you. I'll adopt this rowing backward technique as standard practice whenever I meet these conditions.