The day · Thunder Bay, Ontario
Golden hour · 54 min left
Sun 7.8° up, in the west · Boreal Forest & Shield
The kind of day it is
Front passing
and wet
Pressure is moving. Animals feel this before you do: the hours ahead of a falling barometer are often the best feeding of the week, and the bright, cold, high-pressure day behind it is usually the worst.
Go now, before it arrives. Afterwards, give it a day.
The day, phase by phase
Happening now · 19:05–20:11
1h 6m long
Golden hour
Where the sun is this minute. Its highest today: 44.4°.
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 · Boreal Forest & Shield
The sun drops back into the trees and the light comes sideways through the trunks in long bars. Every horizontal surface catches it and the water turns to metal.
Up close
Insects rise into the warm air column above the water as the surface starts giving up its heat. This is the hatch, and it is why fish come up.
The whole landscape
The whole lake turns over its activity in about forty minutes: perch settle, walleye lift off the break, bats leave the shoreline trees.
In the water now
Walleyebest now
Up on the shoals and weed edges in two to four metres, hunting into the shallows as the light goes.
Smallmouth bassbest now
Rock points and current seams; up on top at first and last light, and willing to chase a surface lure then.
Muskellungebest now
Moving along weed edges and over deep points, often following without taking. The last hour of light is the famous one.
Rainbow troutbest now
Working the seams and feeding lanes where current delivers food, rising freely to a hatch.
Feeding hard on the drop, shut down behind it. The two days after a front are the slowest of the week.
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.
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.
Wind shift and a drop in pressure — stake, tie in, and pick anything ripe before it arrives.
Sitting this one out
Honey bee · Hoverfly · Swallowtail butterflies · Lady beetle · Green lacewing · Ground beetle
The full guide
Everything for Thunder Bay this week in one place.
Boreal Forest & Shield
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 Thunder Bay
One email, Sunday evening. Unsubscribe anytime.