Left Too Early

I think the purple martins may have gotten mixed up this year (or at least I'm hoping so). For the last week or so the martins have been grouping up for their normal departure for the south.

Bright and early Thursday morning (ie 5:30 a.m.) while I was delivering the papers I noticed no squawking of the martins when I got near their houses. I didn't see a one all through town when normally there are literally hundreds.

This morning while doing the papers I did hear a few martins, but I believe these were just stragglers. The rest have departed for warmer climes.

Our weather forecast for the next few days is just wonderful as the temps are to supposed to be up in the low 30's. So either the martins know something that us humans don't or they headed to the south a little too early :) I would think the heat has nothing to do with their departure time though. Looking back a few years it would appear that normally the martins depart somewhere around August 12th, so this would be right on schedule for them to depart on the 14th.

I'm just hoping we get a few more weeks of summer weather or rather maybe we can get a few weeks of what should be summer time weather. We sure haven't had a lot of typical warm/hot summer weather yet this year.

The other thing I noticed when I was out at just after 5 a.m. is how dark it is out then. The days are just slipping by and every day we lose more and more daylight. We all know what that leads to and I'm sure not really looking forward to the 'white' stuff just yet.

Hopefully we'll have a super nice fall that extends to about mid December :)

Well you can always hope can't you?