Niagara Falls - long weekend, Monday

Our last day together in Niagara started with a huge downpour and thunderstorms directly overhead. The forecast suggested a brief pause in the rain around lunchtime as the first of two unusual (for this time of year) 'lake effect' weather systems pushed through the area. It did indeed stop raining around noon so we quickly headed down to the falls so that Helen could see them. In doing so we discovered the largest section, which I'd completely missed on the Wednesday evening:














The combination of sunshine, rain and the falls produced a low rainbow:














The weather quickly turned bad again. We tried out a couple of other State Parks but we eventually conceded and headed early to the airport. Helen got an early flight an made her connection home, they couldn't accommodate me on the early flight to Chicago and my flight was then substantially delayed as a thunderstorm sat directly over the airport for about an hour... sigh... still we did mostly enjoy our visit to Niagara Falls and did get to add another six new life species, bringing our total in the USA to 175 species and world-wide to 663 species.

My trip wasn't over however. I managed around half an hour birding in Birmingham, Alabama and saw lots of common US species including Titmouse, Chickadees, Mockingbirds, Towhees, etc., and this Northern Cardinal sat proud in the morning sunlight, beautiful: