The day · Orlando, Florida
Golden hour · 16 min left
Sun 2.4° up, in the west · Florida Peninsula
The kind of day it is
Wet
and heat, high overcast
Rain on and off. Worms come up, slugs come out, mushrooms start their two-to-seven-day clock, and rivers colour up.
Check the mushroom ground two to seven days from now, and stay off wet beds — you'll compact them.
The day, phase by phase
Happening now · 18:41–19:31
50 min long
Golden hour
Where the sun is this minute. Its highest today: 64.3°.
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 · Florida Peninsula
The sun sets into the Gulf on the west coast and behind the state on the east. Sanibel and Naples get the postcard; Miami gets the afterglow.
Up close
The mangrove shadow line — the sharp edge between shaded and lit water — is the single most important structure in this landscape for a predator. Snook sit in the dark side and eat what swims through the light.
The whole landscape
Wading birds head to their roosts in the thousands. In the dry season, when the water concentrates the fish, the rookeries here are among the great wildlife spectacles of the continent.
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.
On the beds and the shallow flats, in water warm enough to see the bottom.
Run-off colours the water and brings food in. Fish the inflows and the seams.
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.
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.
Slugs work all day, not just at night, and blight moves in wet warm air.
Sitting this one out
Honey bee · Hoverfly · Swallowtail butterflies · Lady beetle · Green lacewing · Ground beetle
The full guide
Everything for Orlando this week in one place.
Florida Peninsula
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 Orlando
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