Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Spring Migration summary

Right then, a summary. For me spring migration season is about a month long, second week of April through second week of May. Of course it starts maybe a month earlier and peters out two weeks later but the numbers are much lower.

#1 Target for me I got this year.... I see one every two or three years.... the Cerulean Warbler, a little guy not a whole lot bigger than a hummingbird. What makes them special is that they winter on the slopes of the cloud forests of the Northern Andes as part of mixed flocks of Tropical species following army ant swarms, only one cerulean per swarm. (bird photos lifted from the 'net}.



What ya gotta look at in the photo are the long primary wing feathers projecting halfway down the tail and the long undertail coverts imparting a streamlined shape. These are long-hop migrants. They leave the Andes direct to the highlands of Central America, fuel up, and from there its a direct flight to North America. In North America they breed in the tall canopy of old growth forests. So they need forests in South America, Central America and the US. Habitat is increasing here in recent decades as our second-growth forest mature but they are getting hammered down south.

They breed in the Mississippi Valley and northeast of there, highest densities in the Appalachians. This here's the female, which is drab for a reason....



Long wings on a bird are like a high gear on a bicycle, you can cruise fast and far but it takes a while to get up to speed. Forest birds don't generally fly fast and far, when a hawk shows they generally jet as fast as they can to the nearest cover, and have long tails so that they can twist and turn on the way there. Hence they have shorter wings, like low gears on a bicycle, that get up to top speed right way.

To compensate, cerulean warblers build a hummingbird like nest on top of a high branch that has open space beneath, they need to do this because when flushed they first plummet straight down to gain speed. I have no idea how the nests escape blue jays and squirrels, but obviously enough do.

This here is the Hudson Highlands, that's the Bear Mountain Bridge, just about 30 miles upriver from Manhattan. When I was in high school these woods were too young to support cerulean warblers, now they do. This is how I know I am getting old



So a four inch and change bird flies all the way from Ecuador to those woods, arriving in May, breeds, turns around and leaves end of June/early July. Can't blink or you'll miss 'em.

Draw a straight line from Guatemala to the Northeast US and you'll see Texas is well west of that line, we gotta have sustained east winds, north or south, to blow 'em this war west.

Always an occasion to find one, they do pass through here but are far more likely on the coast, I found a female down there this year, two males two years earlier.