Birds on the move this weekend after all!
By Patrick Comins on September 21, 2012, 11:05pm
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(Above, Brian Bradley's Gyrfalcon "Dynamite" wows the crowd at a past Migration Festival)
In my last migration outlook I was calling for a bit of a lull through the weekend, and I wasn’t planning to make another post, but now it looks like the front will be reasonably strong and pass thorough overnight Saturday. This could make Sunday a spectacular day for local hawk watches. It is a rare occasion when we have a big hawk flight coinciding with the migration festivals, as the Lighthouse Point Migration Festival is Sunday and Greenwich HawkWatch Weekend is on both days.
To be at Lighthouse Point Park on a good day in September can be quite an experience. Early morning Blue Jay flights can fill the sky, warblers and songbirds can abound in the woods and scrubby areas, hummingbirds stop by the butterfly gardens and zip off again on their journey to Central America, rare birds can fly overhead and barely a few minutes go by when there isn’t one or more raptors in the sky. Peregrine Falcons putting on a show, Merlins chasing Northern Flickers around the park, American Kestrels perching on wires, a Bald Eagle flying over or “yawn” another Osprey. But birds aren’t the only show in town, untold thousands of migrating butterflies and dragonflies pass through the park each year and grab a bit of nectar for the road at the butterfly gardens or hawk-weed poking up through the lawn, or in the case of the dragonflies, grab some other ‘bugs’.
(a common buckyeye at the Lighthouse Point gardens last year)
Quaker Ridge on a good day in September can also be an experience you won’t soon forget, multiple eagles, thousands of Broad-winged Hawks passing over in large kettles or sometimes low overhead. Last Sunday alone 5,400 Broad-winged Hawks were counted there.
Saturday should be a wonderful day to be out. A southerly flow ahead of the front should make for a warm day and could bring up some southern vagrants of the bird or butterfly kind. There are still plenty of rain pools to watch at Rocky Hill Meadows, and I'm sure other spots, but I found few puddles on quick stop at Hammonasset, where a probable Western Tanager was seen in the campground today. Any rain we get with the front will help to refill pools. I was pleasantly surprised at the influx of shorebirds since the last front on my shorebird survey at Menunketesuck Flats, where there were nearly 100 Ruddy Turnstones and good numbers of Black-bellied Plovers, so there are still shorebirds on the move and the front could bring new arrivals.
Landbirds are a wild card this weekend. The quality of the early morning songbird flights will be dependent upon timing of the passage of the front. If it moves through early enough, coastal spots could be good, or if it moves through a little too late the flight could be delayed until Monday Morning. (I will post in the comments section if I hear of any updates). But again, it is September and at least some birds will be moving. Just today there was an immature Indigo Bunting at the feeders at the Bent of the River and I expect I’ll be seeing White-throated Sparrows at the feeders when I return to the office next week, heralding one of my favorite times of year…sparrow season, so keep your feeders clean and full!
(juvenile Indigo Bunting)
September is a great time of year to get outside in Connecticut; you never know what you’ll see!
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