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

Atchafalaya... Sir, you are located mid-stream in all this migration, I'm just over here in the shallows.

Your photos are much better than mine, in fact I only took one.

There's fair numbers of resident mallards around here, of course in ducks males outnumber females, so there's groups of hard up mallard drakes trying to do their duck rape thing on any mallard females not hidden somewhere with eggs and/or young. They look stressed.

This one guy avoided that whole rough dating scene by taking up with a plus-sized girl

We are in an interesting area for birds. Lots of birds migrate through here.

Take osprey for an example, where I spend most of my time is at a point on the Sibley map where they stay year round (To the east of me), spend the winter (to the west of me), and migrate (to the north of me)

Osprey are notorious wanderers, and they are big enough to put active transmitters on. There might be data from coastal Louisiana birds but here's some from the Chesapeake area. Some of the ospreys you see in winter might not be the same birds that were there all summer, its hard to tell.

Dunno if you are familiar with sites like this, apologies if you already are....

https://www.ospreytrax.com/html_files/Woody%202014.html

Thanks for the link. Ospreys are the ultimate fisherman. They love to eat their prey in our deer stands in the marsh. It is is a little messy at times.

Winds out of the south... good. A hour before dark right now. Line of big storms about 100 miles out approaching from the West at about 20mph. If the rain holds off long enough around here after dark to allow birds to get up into the air and moving, could be a good day tomorrow.

Hour and 45 minutes after dark, long N-,S line of storms closing rapidly from the west. Any rain at night is good for dropping some migrants, but this one ain’t gonna stall out while migrants coming up from the south can run into it in one place for a period of time like the last one.

Also, the line of storms is gonna hit along a 200 mile line running SW of here about the same time as they do here, knocking birds down before they get this far north.

Gonna be fun to watch it all roll in though from here on the porch. The dogs are definitely not amused however.

Great info thanks birdwatcher.

I’ve been doing a 5 mile challenge since the covid hit and have over 40 species so far logged. Rarest probably being greater yellow legs or kirtlands warbler

Heard a great gray last week and have been on the hunt but no dice so far.

I don’t carry a camera when I bird...just glasses but I’m run and gun type

Greater Yellowlegs are common here in our limited wetland areas from mid-July when the first southbound shorebirds come through until the following April, Kirtland's are a whole 'nother story of course.

No big effect on migrants from last nights storms, different layout and also getting late in the month. Whatever, 48 hours ago we had a fallout of Blackburnians and others due to rain, last night not many at all. I was three hours in line taking the dog to the feed store Saturday Vet for shots this morning (social distance and alla that) but I did get out for about an hour.

Lucky day, I got one of these a female Golden-winged Warbler.... (bird photos lifted from the 'net).



Didn't make out the yellow cap but the yellow wing coverts and face pattern was a giveaway, hyperactive too, characteristic of the species. Coulda been some second or third generation backcross ergo no yellow cap on account of golden-wings are steadily disappearing, being genetically swamped and displaced by the closely related blue-winged warbler....




This here is what the male golden-wing looks like....



Both inhabit early successional brush and forest edges so both benefited enormously from the clearing of the original forests, both have a generally similar buzzy song and female golden-wings especially will mate with male blue-wings but it happens the other way too. This hybridization in both directions has been going on so long that the two main hybrid types were considered species in their own right back in the days.



Same pic from earlier of the Hudson Highlands maybe thirty miles upriver from Manhattan....



Back in the seventies, golden-wings were common in that area, blue-wings have since gradually spread up from the south and then swamped and gradually replaced the local golden-wing population. Maybe fifteen years back there was a locally famous among birders singing male Lawrences hybrid type visible from a road on West Point maybe five miles from that photo, two or three years in a row. He got lucky and found mates, blue-winged females, but he was the last half-breed of a disappearing breed.

The few places golden-wings are so far holding steady are in the northern edges of their range, mostly up in Canada, but its getting to be an occasion down here to find one.

Birdwatcher, thanks for the tutorial. Friday on the way home from work I stopped at a pond and saw a Prothonotary Warbler. Yesterday was gorgeous here. I saw a Magnolia Warbler in the back yard and Blackburnian, Bay-breasted, Black-and-white, Ovenbird, Black-throated Blue, Yellow-rumped and Chestnut-sided in the development along with Catbird and Scarlet Tanager (among others). Today is cooler and rainy.

I think you are selling yourself short on the lady you met the other day. Ask her out!

I went for a walk in our development after work. There is a great birding ridge above the river. I saw Cedar Waxwing, Blackburnian Warbler, Blackpoll Warbler, Cape May Warbler and Chestnut-sided Warbler. I also saw a Yellow-billed Cuckoo. I had seen a Cape May before in the Dominican Republic but this was the first time in the US for sure (I think I saw one a couple days ago). Also had seen the Cuckoo before (on our property among other places) but this was the first time I was able to get a photo. It was a great outing. Then when I got home I saw a Scarlet Tanager in our back yard.

Black-throated blues and Cape Mays are a rare event in Texas, they winter East of here in the Caribbean so have little cause to pass this way.... but they're so pretty I'll post web pics of 'em anyway....

The Cape May, like the bay-breasted, is a spruce budworm specialist , following outbreaks around from year to year....



And I wish the black-throated blues came through here, I associate them with the woods in the Adirondack Mountains and Vermont...



That Blackpoll you took a photo of is a survivor of an incredible journey....



The whole population moves east in late summer to congregate on the New England Coast where IIRC they fatten up on bayberries (or myrtle? I forget). Then in September huge flocks lift off in the evenings and fly SOUTHEAST out over the Atlantic IIRC above 10,000 feet.

200 - 300 miles out they pick up prevailing high altitude southwest winds and ride them all the way to the coast of Brazil, four days in the air non-stop, one of those things you wouldn't believe if it weren't true. I believe Connecticut Warblers follow a similar path, and have a similarly streamlined look, tho there aren't nearly as many as them.

A book to read if you haven't already, "Living on the Wind: Across the Hemisphere with Migratory Birds." by Scott Weidensaul

https://www.amazon.com/Living-Wind-Across-Hemisphere-Migratory/dp/0865475911

A series of very well written essays about bird migration, for example, they can fly 125 miles per gram of fat, fascinating trivia like that. Weidensaul also wrote a pretty good book about the Early Frontier: Columbus through the French and Indian War called "First Contact". So he's better at birds AND history than me.

Wow. That Blackpoll migration is one of those things that make you go hmm. How the heck did they ever figure out that there was an airstream out there to take them back to Brazil? Pretty dang cool.

Trial and error apparently, involving the death of innumerable individual birds. In songbirds timing, distance and direction is all genetic, implicit in these genes is some degree of random mutation.

Every year a few migrating songbirds inherit the wrong directions, almost always ending in death. Years ago when I was in college a little painted redstart from Northern Mexico turned up at some lady’s feeder in Upstate NY, throngs of birders went to see it, until the lady’s cat ate it.

Sorta like that, in that book I recommended Weidensaul relates the case of a migratory Amazonian rail, that ordinarily migrated around the rain forest, found dead under a bird feeder on Long Island in December.

I had a friend who was a fisheries observer in the Pacific, every fall a few migratory North American songbirds, heading west instead of south, would land on the boats to rest for awhile, before heading out in a doomed attempt to cross the Pacific.

Once in a great while it works, and if this new direction results in more offspring than the old, over subsequent generations this new destination replaces the old.

Third week of May, where down here close to the Gulf Coast, which an estimated one billion songbirds cross every year in the spring, migration always closed out in a deluge of the dreaded Empidonax flycatchers; in this part of the route five species of drab flycatchers sometimes impossible to tell apart.

Here's the easiest and the commonest, easy because its the smallest, the Least Flycatcher



....and here's a bigger one, identified as a willow flycatcher but could just as easily be an alder flycatcher basically you're not really sure until it says something, vocalizations presumably being how the birds themselves tell each other apart.



Same situation as a bunch of other Neotropical migrants; still a whole vast Northwoods in which to breed up north, getting hammered by habitat destruction down south. Decades past these things would even show up in my yard mid to late May, last ten years not so much.

Anyways they pass through late because they eat flying insects, which mostly only fly when its warm out, so early birds this case would get there only to starve to death, which in a songbird can happen in 48 to 72 hours. The early bird don't always get the worm.

Right after breeding, our songbirds replace most of their feathers, a feat which is at least as metabolically demanding as breeding or migrating, since feathers are composed of protein and once the moult starts its gotta be done ASAP. Migratory songbirds have a choice, moult here after breeding or fly south right after breeding and moult down there. Empidonax flycatchers choose the latter option. So they get here late, breed as rapidly as possible, turn around and head back South, blink and you'll miss 'em.

The Eastern Wood Peewee actually isn't an Empidonax flycatcher, and easier to tell apart from 'em. It is named for its call, which "peeeeooooweeee" is the earliest predawn birdsong in the June forests, they usually call during spring migration too and are usually common as dirt but I ain't sure that I've heard or seen even a single one this year...



Kingbirds are flycatchers too, and the most widely distributed in the Eastern half of the Lower 48 and all across the Canadian Northwoods is the Eastern Kingbird. Interesting because, alone of all our flycatchers, they undergo a radical behavioral shift in the Wet Tropics and become wandering fruit eaters, gathering in enormous flocks. I'm sure they are still common as dirt somewhere, on the coast whole rivers of these things pass by early May. Ain't seen a one, there or here.





Among all these migrant flycatchers, there's gotta be one Uber; the hardest to find, the most specialized in habits, the one that flies the furthest, the one most on the way out. And indeed there is, the robin-sized Olive-sided Flycatcher.



Specializes on bees and wasps, forages almost exclusively from the tops of tall dead trees around forest openings, migrates the longest distance of any flycatcher, winters on the Eastern slopes of the Andes in Chile, Ecuador and Peru, where once again it needs bees and wasps and tall dead snags in forested areas. Besides all this the lowest reproductive rate of any North American flycatcher. its specialized niche limits even the amount of young it can raise.

Population dwindling rapidly, again habitat destruction down south. Only saving grace of finding these things on spring migration is, if one is around, its gonna be a robin-sized bird sitting on top a tall dead tree. Hadn't seen any at all this year, not sure if I did last year, but then yesterday morning early I'm walking my dogs in the Hill Country north of town, climb a steep hill and on the top there's a dead juniper tree maybe five feet tall.

Tallest dead tree around, and there was an Olive-sided Flycatcher perched on top. For me that was a "well hey, thankyou God" moment

I have seen Eastern King birds in North Dakota and here in Michigan. I've only seen a couple so far this year. We have many Eastern Wood-Pewees here. One of my favorite bird calls.

We had male indigo bunting at out feeder the the other day, it was the third time I have seen one here in the last 30 years.

Eastern kingbirds breed as far west as E. WA and NE Calif. At least from what I've seen. Pairs in both places, hanging around for the summer.

Just saw one the other day near our place here. Had a pair I saw every year in the same spot in E WA when I worked up there. Shocked me, as I had seen them along the Allegheny drainage in NW PA, but never out west until then. Had to look up their range in the bird book!

This here is a black-throated green warbler, widespread in the Northwoods and across the eastern hardwood forest, a separate population gets here a bit earlier and breeds on the North Carolina coast, but those birds winter in the Carribean.



Turns out there's an earlier window, March through May, when the climate in the Texas Hill Country resembles that further north. The steep hillsides and narrow ravines support bigtooth maple, sycamores and Ashe juniper (AKA cedar), effectively a small area eastern hardwood forest two months ahead of schedule. Over time it is presumed that Texas had its own population of some common ancestor of today's black-throated green. Over the centuries, this population was presumably reproductively isolate by timing and location and became the golden-cheeked warbler



The songs of the two species are similar, and some degree interbreeding with black-throated greens occurs, but golden-cheeked warblers do all their breeding in March and early April, and black-throateds mostly come through after that.

How many golden-cheeked warblers there were "back in the days" is debatable, most of the Hill Country was burned over prairie with just pockets of woodland habitats in the steeper-sided ravines. One limiting factor has been that female golden-cheeks will not built their nests out of anything other than strips of juniper bark, and these shreds of bark do not appear on a juniper tree until the tree is past about 50 years of age.

Not being a prairie species, golden-cheeked warblers were little affected with the passing of the prairie, in fact their habitat expanded. For the first 150 years of Anglo settlement golden-cheeked warblers came and went mostly unnoticed by ranchers. Arrived in early March, bred, headed back to the highlands of Central America beginning in early June. The woodlands in the ravines survived cattle and old Juniper trees offered shade (the warbler has no use for young junipers).

Late 20th Century the Texas Hill Country. one of the most beautiful and unique regions on earth, begins to disappear under a wave of acreage homesites, a thing continuing unabated to this very day. Out of concern for the warbler and also as a strategy to stop this development, the warbler was put on the Endangered Species list in 1990. There is very little public land in Texas, the economic burden for preserving this warbler was gonna land on private landowners and ranchers. In recognition of that, and in recognition that ranching had little or no effect on warbler populations, Texas Parks and Wildlife did nothing, they couldn't have even tried to do anything anyway without stirring up a shidtstorm.

Then came the election year of 1992, Bill Clinton was elected. 1994 his Secretary of the Interior suddenly declares TWENTY-THREE WHOLE COUNTIES of Central Texas as critical habitat for the warbler, meaning in theory a rancher couldn't even cut a tree without Federal permission. Furor erupts, people go out shotgunning for warblers, the Hill Country echoes with chainsaws as ranchers cut down every old cedar tree in sight, lest the Feds come and inventory their land. "Golden-cheeked Warbler Barbecues" are held as part of public protest rallies.

Here in Texas, 1994 was an election year, a newcomer in politics, one George W. Bush, runs against Democrat incumbent Anne Richards for Governor. This was the year of the backlash against everything Bill Clinton, including don't ask don't tell, and here in Texas George W. Bush hung the warbler issue around Ann Richards' neck.
So, the warbler played a significant role in turning Texas Red, where it narrowly remains twenty-six years later.

At the time of its listing an estimated 10,000 pairs of golden-cheeked warblers remained, maybe more than there ever was before Anglo settlement. Putting it on the Endangered Species List may have been the worst thing that ever happened to it. The beautiful Texas Hill Country is still rapidly going under, and all those cut down old cedars are still gone. I dunno that anyone knows how many warblers we got left.

Interesting foot note in History of TX Wildlife Mgt. I remember it well. Thanks for posting that Mike.

Valsdad, now that you mention it I do remember seeing an Eastern Kingbird at my place in the foothills of the Blue Mountains east of Walla Walla, WA. They do get around!