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Sunspot activity and bad weather

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My birdwatching has been limited lately to just weekends since it is almost dark by the time I get home from work.

If there is a bad-weather day on the weekend (such as last Saturday), my bird watching drops down to almost zero.

I did spot a female pine grosbeak several weeks ago snooping around the pear tree. I was hoping to see the more brightly-colored male, but either he wasn't there or I missed him. The female was a busy little creature, hopping here and there while looking for food.

The female pine grosbeak is about 73/4 inches long with a yellow-olive head and rump, gray underparts and back, and black wings and tail. What really stands out with the female is the white wing bars, which look like military stripes.

The male pine grosbeak is much more colorful with a pinkish-red head, breast, back and rump -- colors that are easy to see this time of the year when almost everything in nature is gray or dull brown.

According to the bird books, the pine grosbeak is the largest of the finch family and is usually found in the boreal forests of Canada. They often make trips looking for food into the northern United States and have a particular fondness for fruit.

Sunspot stories

I recently read an article saying that the number of sunspots will be increasing in the next few years.

Sunspots are planet-size areas on the sun where magnetic fields have broken through to the sun's surface. Spectacular solar flares are one of the results of increased sunspot activity.

Sunspots run in an 11-year cycle and, on earth, we are at the end of the low part of the cycle. Some weather experts believe that weather on earth is affected by the sunspot cycle. Weather observations over the years point to much colder weather on earth during the low sunspot activity.

Sunspots have been monitored since 1610 after the telescope was invented. It is believed that the "Little Ice Age," which caused devastatingly cold weather from about 1250 to about 1650 in the Northern Hemisphere, occurred during low sunspot activity. The effects of the ice age were well-documented in England, Europe and North America.

In the mid-17th century, glaciers in the Swiss Alps advanced, destroying farms and villages. The Thames River in England and the canals in the Netherlands froze over, this allowing "frost fairs" to be held on the ice. The last frost fair was held in 1814, thus indicating a warming in the hemisphere.

In the winter of 1780, New York Harbor was frozen, and people walked on the ice from Staten Island to Manhattan.

The weather was so severe that grain crops in Iceland and Greenland failed, causing starvation among residents there. In North America, American Indians formed groups to look for food.

The Great Famine of 1315-1317 in Europe caused millions of deaths over a period of several years.

There were crop failures because the weather stayed cool and there was constant rain. The grain could not ripen, there was no food for the animals and people died. Children were abandoned to fend for themselves and incidents of cannibalism were recorded.

In the summer of 1317, the weather patterns finally went back to normal, but it took until 1325 for the food supply to return to normal and the population to start to increase again.

It is estimated between 10-25 percent of the population of Europe died in the Great Famine.

This time period was also a time of increased volcanic activity in the world, also affecting the weather. The 1815 eruption of Tambora in Indonesia filled the atmosphere with ash, thus leading to the "Year Without a Summer" in 1816, when frost and snow were recorded in June and July in New England and in Northern Europe.