projo.com | Subterranean Homepage News

« Carved books | Main | Forget your PIN often? 25 weird animals; Eating tomatoes; Roots radio; Not spam, bacn »

August 21, 2007

Category 5 hurricane hits hummingbirds' winter home, heads for Mexican oil fields

An offshore oil installation in the Gulf of Mexico near the coast of Campeche, Mexico. Pemex, Mexican's national oil company, evacuated all 14,354 offshore workers in the southern Gulf, which includes the giant Cantarell oil field, below.

Here's a great locator map of the area.

The Oil Drum (click to enlarge)

Dean is now the ninth most powerful storm on record, the first hurricane since Andrew in 1992 to make landfall in the Western Hemisphere as a category 5 storm. Over land overnight, it has weakened to a category 3 with winds of 125 mph. Next stop: Mexican oil fields. The Oil Drum is all over it.

NOAA: "DEAN MADE LANDFALL ON THE EAST COAST OF THE YUCATAN PENINSULA NEAR THE CRUISE SHIP PORT OF COSTA MAYA AROUND 0830 UTC...AND THE EYE IS NOW JUST INLAND. OBSERVATIONS FROM AN AIR FORCE HURRICANE HUNTER PLANE INDICATE THAT THE HURRICANE WAS INTENSIFYING RIGHT UP TO LANDFALL."

That was around 4:30 a.m. EDT just north of Chetumal, the capital of Quintana Roo, between Cancun to the north and Belize to the south. Costa Maya is home to the Sian Ka'an Biosphere Reserve, near the Mayan Ruins of Tulum.

Laura's Birding Blog: Dean looks bad for humans and hummingbirds:

The Yucatan is... where virtually all our Ruby-throated Hummingbirds spend the winter.

Right now some adult males are already there, some may be striking out on the Gulf coast headed for there, and all the ones still in our backyards are headed in that general direction. The storm will undoubtedly kill some--anything that can rip apart a house isn't going to be very gentle to a bird that weighs one tenth of an ounce. Of course, birds can feel, literally in their bones but also in all their air sacs, the low barometric pressure associated with hurricanes, and except for exhausted birds flying over the Gulf, many will be able to stay ahead of the storm, which is only traveling 20 miles per hour right now, while hummingbirds have little trouble sustaining 30 mile per hour flight. So not all that many will be outright killed by the storm.

But as with all tremendous storms, this one will destroy habitat...

Absurdly related: Blogger Laura Erickson's For the Birds site includes The Owls of Harry Potter, with a photo of her as "Professor McGonagowl."

Posted by Sheila Lennon at 9:54 AM | Permalink