Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Gonna be a bird catastrophe over the Gulf tonight

Evening grosbeaks are maybe my favorite. They're my fishing camp buddies. Up on the upper reaches of the St Croix they show up and much further north in Canada they are more common. They are friendly little buggers and in rough weather they don't mind seeking shelter inside the camp under cover to get out of the weather. They're polite and do not steal food, and a little chirpy at times which is welcome when it's too ugly our to fish. They seem to appreciate warm and dry about as much as I do.

Courious,how will we know if this has a really negative impact on the tweeters?

SOb we just got beat to death with hail

I keep hope open for those Whoopers over in Horicon to make it over to Fish Lake and Crex with some of the Sand Hill Cranes, but I haven't seen them mixed yet like down on the Platt

Interesting stuff, 'watcher. Any updates on, or even a way to know how many fell out?

And if the little birdies manage to make the flight, guess who is waiting for them:

We had that wind all day today.

It sucked.

Hell storm that came through my joint was only 1” but dense as hell

I could fill a 55 gallon drum with just the house cats we've killed on my property here in Florida.

People keep buying them and letting them roam, I keep blasting them when they show up here.

They seem to be attracted to the Cardinals that hang in the low brush around my place.

My dogs have perfected a sneak and destroy technique that's pretty effective, the quick cats that make it up a tree to evade the dogs get dropped with my 25 caliber air rifle.

Most likely we won’t because

1. Our estimates of bird populations aren’t that exact across their wide ranges.
2. There are a whole bunch of other mortality factors in play.
3. Many areas have extra birds that don’t get to breed due to competition, these will take up the slack.
4. Only a small fraction of any species is crossing the gulf on any given night. Exactly when they come back is always a roll of the dice and is largely genetic, early birds benefit in mild springs but get hammered by late spring cold snaps. Late birds might not get to breed at all unless the early ones get taken out.

Hurricanes and tropical storms in the fall are at least as common as late April cold fronts and must play havoc with birds crossing the gulf, many of which must get scattered way out over the ocean.

The only weather event we know for a fact hammered a migrant bird population was Hurricane Wilma, third week of October 2005. The eye crossed Florida and moved up parallel to the coast just offshore clear past Newfoundland.

Afterwards more than 700 dead chimney swifts were found in Europe. IIRC Live ones were reported from Scotland to Spain. Imagine how many of these small birds must have died such that 700 were picked up, and how many more never made it to land. More than that how many kazillion other songbirds that don’t fly as well as chimney swifts perished at sea.

The scattered live swifts if they were able to feed at all would possibly head back west over the Atlantic in a doomed attempt to reach the headwaters of the Amazon where they winter.

Turns out most of those swifts were from the Eastern Canadian population, which was down by 50% the following year. We know this because chimney swift populations, because they actually do nest in chimneys (used to be hollow trees) are relatively easy to count.

If they had been forest birds, which are best counted by vague measures like the number of singing males over relatively tiny census areas in the spring, the loss wouldn’t have been nearly that obvious.

My wife said she saw a NOTAM (Notice To Air Mission…used to be Notice To AirMen) on the flights out of Costa Rica warning of migrating birds and cautioning aircraft to be aware of the potential for bird strikes.

Who is "we"? You belong to some bird club?

How come your migration maps show zero migration through CO? That seems impossible.

Here's a pic of a Kestrel in a cottonwood across the street from my house. He had just caught a mouse in the meadow grass and flown up on the limb. Bad Ass, huh.

He and his mate have been nesting in that same tree for several years. The hen is very nondescript. Most peeps would look right past her sitting on the barbed wire.

One of my neighbors took the pic, he knows what he's doing.

From the link birdy provided:



Hope that was helpful.

I saw that, but there are no mountains in the eastern half. Same with Montana too. Course there isn't chit for trees either, at least compared to heavy migration areas noted.

Absolutely, it’s called All of Humanity, and we think we know what we know from the activities of a few hundred Ornithologists, mostly across the collective Western world.


It’s not a perfect measure, but is based upon concrete data in the form of weather radar imagery. I dunno the specifics but a crapload of birds gotta be airborne to register.

Here’s the image from an hour ago; 3am Eastern Time. Note that the cold front which hit the coast around 10pm has knocked all the birds across much of Texas off of the radar. Presumably they either landed or are too low down to register.

Note a purple fuzz of migrating birds over SE Colorado tho none at all over Nebraska right now. Also note, judging by the dots, only three reporting weather stations across all of Colorado. Maybe the mountains get in the way.

‘Nother question is, why don’t they project radar returns from over water, particularly over the Gulf, I dunno.

That is a great photo. That vole likely weighs more than that little male kestrel.

Fun fact; rodent pee reflects UV light (I dunno if that’s true for urine in general) and kestrels, as is common in birds, can see into the UV light spectrum. It is thought that seeing rodent pee can help kestrels find them.

Literally millions of raptors pass over Veracruz Mexico in the fall, funelled by the coastline of the gulf, so many that when people are counting on the ground using one of those mechanical thumb clicker counters each click represents an estimated hundred hawks.

I dunno how they manage air flights in and out of that city at all.

Good stuff Birdie,interesting.
Gonna send a pm with a question unrelated here.
thanks

So quick question.... When the barometric drop sense of most animals kicks in don't they seek shelter and hunker down?