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Yes, I do feed the birds in winter, and yes, they know I do and line up for it like Marines looking for chow. And while those sparrows don’t do a whole lot of migrating to warmer climes when the snow flies, there are plenty of birds that do take that trip in flocks so vast that they can block out the sun.<\/p>\n
That’s also true of bugs. Swarms of locusts are being picked up on radar, so vast that they appear to be approaching rainstorms. It isn’t the first time this has happened, but it does appear to be on the increase.\u00a0 The desert locust upsurge, as it is being labeled, is attracting the kind of attention that worried Pharaoh (a\/k\/a Ramses III) when Moses was trying to pry the Israelites loose from his employment schemes.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/onezero.medium.com\/locust-swarms-are-getting-so-big-that-we-need-radar-to-track-them-dc79c06496a0<\/a><\/p>\n From the article:\u00a0 In June of 2020, in addition to the devastating COVID-19 pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests, a remote sensing analyst named Raj Bhagat observed an odd signal on India\u2019s weather radar. What appeared to be rain moving southwest, turned out to be a massive locust swarm.<\/p>\n Prior to this weird anomaly, earlier in the year smaller clusters of locusts had begun to ravage crops and people\u2019s livelihood in India. Bhagat works at the\u00a0World Resources Institute India<\/a> and stated the new clusters and timeline in the city of Lucknow \u201cwere perfectly matching.\u201d \u2013<\/p>\n The idea of using remote sensing technologies like radar to spy on locust swarms is not new. A 1955\u00a0letter in the journal\u00a0Nature<\/em>\u00a0reported<\/a>\u00a0the first such sighting on British naval radar the previous year. HMS\u00a0Wild Goose<\/em> had detected a humongous 48-kilometer-wide swarm of desert locusts flying over the Persian Gulf. (48 kilometers will equal just under 30 miles wide. That’s one big swarm of bugs.)<\/p>\n Bhagat says he thinks his sightings are the first weather radar detections of locusts in India, though his observations haven\u2019t been confirmed yet.\u00a0Ryan Neely III<\/a>, an atmospheric scientist at the University of Leeds in the U.K., is building a specialized system to do the same kind of analysis. It is absolutely possible to use weather radar to spot the insects, he says. They are, after all, not that dissimilar from large raindrops. – article<\/p>\n Are there plagues at work here? Anyone got an answer? Anyone? Bueller?<\/p>\n