The day · New Orleans, Louisiana
Golden hour · 46 min left
Sun 8.9° up, in the west · Gulf Coast & Mississippi Lowlands
The kind of day it is
Heat
and bluebird
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 · 18:16–19:06
50 min long
Golden hour
Where the sun is this minute. Its highest today: 62.9°.
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 · Gulf Coast & Mississippi Lowlands
The sun sets into the water on the western Gulf and behind the marsh on the eastern. Either way the light goes copper and the sky is enormous.
Up close
The water surface begins to give back its heat and the oxygen creeps up with it. Fish that have been deep and sullen all afternoon come up onto the flats.
The whole landscape
Shrimp move on the tide at dusk, and everything follows the shrimp. The whole Gulf food web is timed to that migration.
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.
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.
On the newest growth and the undersides of leaves, reproducing steadily through warm daylight.
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 New Orleans this week in one place.
Gulf Coast & Mississippi Lowlands
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 New Orleans
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