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It was a Flop... February 2024 Disco. Thread


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2 minutes ago, radarman said:

A smorgasboard for the chickens

Unfortunately guinea hens are more known for clearing ticks than chickens. I haven’t noticed any of my girls eating them as any I catch I squash. But if those lantern flies make it up here it’ll be a fly feast with the way my girls stalk and eat moths. 

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17 minutes ago, Damage In Tolland said:

This is going to to be an epic bug and insect spring/ summer. Warm winter with zero cold, wet winter until Feb / tons of water in ground and a torch Morch/ Napril.. They’ll be out over next few weeks splatting in car windshields and grills . Not looking forward to that 

The cicadas!  2 of the 15 broods are emerging this year.  1 trillion of those guys will be crawling out of the ground in 2024.
Makes the birds go insane a la Tippi Hedren-style.

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Just now, Damage In Tolland said:

Hopefully gypsies are back on n full force next year . Should be a very dry summer 

We had a stand of old Cherry trees along the road-side.  That was a particular favorite for the gypsies.  

The nostalgia of the 80's gypsy moths.  Infested trees and old men with black knee-high socks smearing grease around their trunks. 

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43 minutes ago, dendrite said:

It won’t be long before those lone star ticks are even up to my neighborhood. They’re more aggressive than other ticks.

It's probably not entirely true but I've read they don't move slowly. They can run ... and run at you. 

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48 minutes ago, dendrite said:

Anyway. Quite a change of the airmass today. It was 34/32 here at 4am but 25/6 a little over 5hrs later. 

It seems to be the last of the -EPO's cold loading from last week's dive.   Can trace the air mass back...  

And it does appear to be the last as this week the transition into an entirely new paradigm gets underway.  Who's to say if it sets the table for the whole spring (we may regress mid month), but at least that first week of March, the overnight op versions looking more concerted with the ens telecon projection. 

Lawns tinting green with forsythias

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5 minutes ago, Typhoon Tip said:

It seems to be the last of the -EPO's cold loading from last week's dive.   Can trace the air mass back...  

And it does appear to be the last as this week the transition into an entirely new paradigm gets underway.  Who's to say if it sets the table for the whole spring (we may regress mid month), but at least that first week of March, the overnight op versions looking more concerted with the ens telecon projection. 

Lawns tinting green with forsythias

The wildlife at least thinks it’s over. The birds are all out singing early in the morning now. Sounded like mid-March here today

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Planter boxes are freeing up! They will certainly be snow free at some point this coming week. But then I'll need to clean up the mess underneath the collapsed portable garage. Which I'm not looking foward to. At all.

Maybe I can use the loader to pile the rest of the yard's snow on top of it so I don't have to think about it until June...

DSC01590compressed.jpg

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1 hour ago, Patrick-02540 said:

We had a stand of old Cherry trees along the road-side.  That was a particular favorite for the gypsies.  

The nostalgia of the 80's gypsy moths.  Infested trees and old men with black knee-high socks smearing grease around their trunks. 

Those were probably chokecheries. Tent caterpillars love nesting in those.

 

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3 hours ago, Damage In Tolland said:

This is going to to be an epic bug and insect spring/ summer. Warm winter with zero cold, wet winter until Feb / tons of water in ground and a torch Morch/ Napril.. They’ll be out over next few weeks splatting in car windshields and grills . Not looking forward to that 

Maybe.  Last year we had a wet May and a near-constant rainy June, and we feared the worst.  Instead, black flies and mosquito populations were less than usual, and we had the fewest deerflies since we lived in Gardiner.  BN tick attachments also.

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13 minutes ago, tamarack said:

Maybe.  Last year we had a wet May and a near-constant rainy June, and we feared the worst.  Instead, black flies and mosquito populations were less than usual, and we had the fewest deerflies since we lived in Gardiner.  BN tick attachments also.

 Oddly last summer was not bad for mosquitoes here.  The larvae probably all drowned from the constant rain.

As usual ticks were bad spring and fall but fairly scarce in the summer. Interestingly there were a lot of pet owners having flea problems last year. Our vet said it was unlike anything he’s ever seen.

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38 minutes ago, tamarack said:

Maybe.  Last year we had a wet May and a near-constant rainy June, and we feared the worst.  Instead, black flies and mosquito populations were less than usual, and we had the fewest deerflies since we lived in Gardiner.  BN tick attachments also.

Definitely must have been some regional variance there...  It's anecdotal but it was horrible down here.  You'd pull into your driveway, park the car, and in broad daylight sometimes even with the sun shining, the mosquitoes would immediately be bouncing off the windows of the car.  Closer to dusk you ran to the front door and hoped you didn't drop your keys fumbling around in haste because there'd already be several of them landing on your forearms, while the atonal chorus hummed around your ears.  

Ticks were everywhere, too.

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50 minutes ago, tamarack said:

Maybe.  Last year we had a wet May and a near-constant rainy June, and we feared the worst.  Instead, black flies and mosquito populations were less than usual, and we had the fewest deerflies since we lived in Gardiner.  BN tick attachments also.

Same here. Struck me as very odd. Maybe their pools were washed away with all the rain?

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2 hours ago, kdxken said:

Those were probably chokecheries. Tent caterpillars love nesting in those.

 

 

1 hour ago, Patrick-02540 said:

Yes, Chokecherries. 

If they're proper trees they're black cherry. Choke cherry doesn't grow very large, more like a glorified shrub.

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2 hours ago, HIPPYVALLEY said:

 Oddly last summer was not bad for mosquitoes here.  The larvae probably all drowned from the constant rain.

As usual ticks were bad spring and fall but fairly scarce in the summer. Interestingly there were a lot of pet owners having flea problems last year. Our vet said it was unlike anything he’s ever seen.

The ticks seem to go away, or estivate, or something from mid-July thru August.  Our Parks and Lands peer review forest trip in 2019 was in southern Maine - Newcastle, Swan Island (with its huge deer population), Hebron and Skowhegan, 40 people walking in tick-infested areas in mid-August.  I figured we would have a tick-pickin' horror show but, if anyone saw a tick, I never heard about it.  (And I was responsible for listening and writing up the trip notes.)  Since then, the tick-free Augusts have continued.  My personal record was 26 deer ticks at the Topsham lot, but that was in late October.  I was tossing them out the window as I drove up I-295 toward Augusta.

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