As we knock on the door of Labor Day, known locally as “take back our beaches day”, we are already in what can reasonably be called “early fall” in the bird calendar. While we enjoy the last days of summer, restless songbirds, done raising kids, already dream of the humid tropical lowlands, Andean cloud forests, and Argentinian grasslands that call them, against all common sense, to risk hurricanes and hungry falcons to get there.
But don’t expect the birds to be all up in your face in fall migration, as it’s often a subtle affair. In spring the birds come roaring back all bright and loud, belting out their Broadway songs straight from the diaphragm. But fall migration is an Irish goodbye – by the time you notice you’re not hearing the catbirds anymore they’ve been gone two weeks. Warblers of thirty species slip through quietly in August and early September, revealing themselves mainly to the birders who try hard enough. Experienced observers have noted Blackburnian, Bay-breasted, and Cape May Warblers moving through in recent days, all fresh from northern coniferous forests.
Sometimes, if you’re lucky, the rowdier migrants give the secretive ones away. Recently, as I left the office already later than I had promised, I was unavoidably detained by the first big mixed flock of migrants I’d yet seen this season. Birds were everywhere – a small, fruit-laden beach plum held four orioles, bluebirds and Pine Warblers swirled in the grassland, Eastern Kingbirds were at the top of every tree. They had my attention, so I pished a little, that sibilant sound birders use to trick birds out of the thickets. Instantly, I was rewarded with a Canada Warbler, briefly displaying all the field marks of this lovely, uncommon songbird – blue gray on top with yellow spectacles, and underneath a black pearl fringe necklace set against bright yellow breast and belly.
Just about anywhere with a shred of natural vegetation could produce one of these mixed flocks of restless, mostly local birds preparing for migration. Over the weekend I was at a playground in what I’ll call “downtown Harwich”. I found myself in the usual lonely situation where I am the only person in a public place who is noticing birds, but they were everywhere at the edges of the woods. Bluebirds and Pine Warblers moved noisily through the open woods, even perching on the baseball field fence and swing sets. Bright male orioles, maybe the ones you’re not seeing in your yard anymore, flitted from tree to tree. Cedar Waxwings, bluebirds, and even the orioles sallied forth to snatch flying insects from the woodland edge. A Great-crested Flycatcher, one of the loudest birds in our spring woods, foraged silently – I never would have noticed it save for the rest of them. Soon it will be in Panama.
Other birders at Wellfleet Bay Sanctuary noted an Olive-sided Flycatcher, a rare transient from northern bogs and burned-over forests. They start migration early since some go as far as Bolivia. I’m lucky to see one a year. In fall, they always sit quietly in high, dead branches and dare you to notice them. I suspect the birders saw them because the several noisy, active kingbirds in the same area gave it away.
If you care to, you should keep an eye and an ear out for some of the noisier, more obvious local birds as they prepare for migration, to enjoy them for their own merits, of course, but also because they could reveal some of the sneakier warblers, flycatchers, and tanagers trying to pass through unnoticed. As these shy migrants try to slip out the back door of the party, maybe you can give them a knowing nod, and wish them luck on that 4000-mile flight to Bolivia.
