The day · Atlanta, Georgia
Golden hour · 28 min left
Sun 4.7° up, in the west · Southeastern Piedmont & Coastal Plain
The kind of day it is
Heat
Hot. Growth is fast and stressed, trout and salmon retreat to springs and depth, and the useful hours are at the two ends of the day.
Water deeply at dusk, not at noon. Fish the springs, the shade and the depth.
The day, phase by phase
Happening now · 18:53–19:45
52 min long
Golden hour
Where the sun is this minute. Its highest today: 59.1°.
The sun drops back through the low angles and the long atmospheric path returns, warming the colour of everything. Shadows stretch to many times the height of what casts them.
Where the light lands · Southeastern Piedmont & Coastal Plain
The light goes long and gold through the pine trunks and the wiregrass lights up from behind.
Up close
The heat comes off the sand and the insects lift. Nighthawks and chimney swifts work the column, and bats come in behind them.
The whole landscape
This is when the woods sound like themselves: chuck-will's-widow starts up, and the whole insect chorus of a southern summer night comes on within about fifteen minutes.
In the water now
Rainbow troutbest now
Working the seams and feeding lanes where current delivers food, rising freely to a hatch.
Redfish (red drum)best now
Tailing on the shallow flats on a rising tide, backs out of the water, rooting in the grass.
Cruising the weed edges, pads and shallow flats, ambushing anything that moves across the top.
Suspended over brush and around lit docks after dark, looking upward for anything silhouetted.
Warm water holds less oxygen. Fish the springs, the inflows and the deep water, and release quickly.
In the garden now
Out earlier and later than any other bee — a bumble bee can shiver its flight muscles warm and fly at 5 °C, in drizzle, in wind.
Feeding hardest in the first and last hour — it burns through the night's reserves by dawn and must refuel before dark.
Motionless on a flower head or stem, waiting. A mantis hunts by sight and needs the light.
Sitting head-down at the hub of the web. Many rebuild the whole orb at dawn, eating the old silk.
Above about 32 °C tomatoes drop their flowers and lettuce turns bitter.
Sitting this one out
Honey bee · Hoverfly · Monarch butterfly · Swallowtail butterflies · Lady beetle · Green lacewing
The full guide
Everything for Atlanta this week in one place.
Southeastern Piedmont & Coastal Plain
The region this day belongs to, and what lives in it.
The almanac
The year's arc: day length, the moon and the water behind the air.
The week ahead for Atlanta
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