This past weekend I was unchained from my desk for a rare opportunity to get out and take some folks birding – in this case it was a weekend-long “Birding the Fall Migration” Field School for Mass Audubon. From Friday afternoon through Sunday I had a captive audience of people to point out birds to. These gluttons for punishment were even paying for the experience. You never know what the weather and migration gods will provide for these things, but they smiled on us this weekend, as we had excellent luck with both. We even got to see what the cool kids in birding call “vis mig”, or visible migration.
While we understand that migration is happening because we see birds that weren’t here yesterday or last week, or we notice that our hummingbirds and orioles are gone, for example, we don’t usually see active bird migration when it comes to the smaller, nocturnal migrants like warblers, sparrows, tanagers, flycatchers, buntings, and so on. Sure, we can see hawks and seabirds migrating past favored watch locations like Hawk Mountain and Cape May, New Jersey, but the little guys move under cover of darkness, in part to avoid the big guys, like falcons.
On Saturday, I noticed the wind was supposed to swing northwest after midnight, after several days of south or east winds that likely kept migrants grounded. I suspected the favorable winds would motivate birds to take off and migrate, and any that ended up over the Gulf of Maine could make landfall here. It was only a few hours of favorable winds, so this was a bit of a crackpot theory. Nevertheless, I took my group to High Head in North Truro, which can be a great place to see recently arrived migrants in both spring and fall.
We arrived at the genteel hour of 9AM, feeling a bit tardy. High Head is, well, pretty high for Cape Cod, and high places draw birds. It’s also a stone’s throw from both the ocean and the bay and is covered by dense, fruity thickets, with swamps and marshes below. It’s like a big motel and restaurant for weary feathered travelers looking to feel a branch under their feet again. It turned out that we were right on time – the longer we were there, the more flight calls I heard overhead from warblers. Other migrants were immediately evident – multiple flocks of Cedar Waxwings, a little group of orioles, a male black-throated Blue Warbler, an Eastern Wood-Pewee, several flickers.
Most of the warblers were leaving High Head to continue west toward Provincetown before we could get good looks at them. I tried to photograph a few, but focusing on a 4” bird zig-zagging around 100 feet up in a featureless sky is about as hard as it sounds. Eventually we found birds streaming east to west through the thickets. At one point we had eight vireos of three species in the same field of view. We watched Northern Parulas, tiny blue and yellow warblers, feeding frenetically in a black locust, snatching tiny caterpillars from the leaves one after the other. Purple Finches and Red-breasted Nuthatches, down from the boreal forests, called everywhere. This was exciting birding, and I felt like we were just scratching the surface, but sadly we had a whale watch boat to catch, so we reluctantly retreated, leaving many birds un-watched.
According to Cornell’s BirdCast site, Friday night was indeed the biggest migration night of the fall here. Today could also be good, with white-hot migration predicted across the northeast, so get out there if you can. Maybe you’ll even see some visible migration. But make sure to call it “vis mig” when you talk to your friends – they will definitely think you’re cool.
