For those of us who are still scratching our heads about this year's spring bird migration, there seem to be more questions than answers and, of course, theories aplenty. Only yesterday (June 8) there was a female black-throated green warbler in our yard in southeast Ohio—a bird that should be in the northern forests brooding eggs or feeding nestlings by now.
Both of these guys are avid birders with loads of spring migration experience—Greg primarily in the upper Midwest in Illinois and David in both Wisconsin and New Jersey. I found what they had to say quite informative and most interesting.
Taking a respite from posting all my content, quips, and thoughts to the immediate-gratification machines of the social media channels, I thought I'd add a pithy question here on the dusty old Bill of the Birds blog.
Male cerulean warbler.
So...How was spring migration in your area?
I'm hearing that the spectacle of migration was quite unimpressive in many parts of the eastern half of the United States. I was at Magee Marsh in northwestern Ohio from May 10 to 14—which normally would be at or near the peak of spring songbird migration. My experience was one of "more people than birds," which is unusual for that spot at that season. Even at my farm in southeastern Ohio the migration seemed to be in dribs and drabs with no single day standing out as impressive or amazing.
All of this begs the question: Is this our new subdued migration reality? Have we reached (or passed) some sort of songbird-population tipping point where numbers of warblers, thrushes, tanager, orioles, vireos, etc, have crashed? In other words, are we experiencing "Silent Spring?"
Or, is this spring an anomaly, affected by weather, foliage development, insect hatches, etc?
I'd love to hear how the migration was in your region. Please use the comments section here, or comment on the inevitable Facebook and Twitter posts for this blog topic.
In an upcoming episode of our Out There With the Birds podcast, Ben Lizdas interviews several avid birders about the spring migration of 2017. Tune in to find out what they say.
I looked out the window on last Monday morning and there was the first junco of the season, on the lawn near the edge of the woods. The arrival of these "snowbirds" as the locals call them coincides with the first real cold fronts of the season. The junco's gray-skies-above, snow-on-the-ground two-tone plumage mimics the winter weather enjoyed or endured by those of us living in the upper two-thirds of North America.
So I guess that settles it. It's officially winter round here.
As an aside, my Grandmother Thompson swore that my first word was "junco." I was sitting in a high chair, eating Cream of Wheat, when she pointed at the bird feeder out the kitchen window at a junco. She probably said the word first and I repeated it. I'm not going to claim to have any bird identification prowess at all at the age of 18 months.
Bird migration is starting all around the world. This year I'm migrating myself—over to the Middle East to take part in Champions of the Flyway in Eilat, Israel. Teams of birders are competing to raise money to help BirdLife International stop the illegal killing of migrant birds along the Mediterranean/Black Sea flyway.
The 2016 Champions teams have already raised more than the original goal of $50,000, but now we're trying to see how much we can raise.
The Way-Off Coursers official logo.
You can learn all about this event, the teams, the causes, and so on, on the Champions website.
At this moment, I am sitting in the Turkish Airlines area of JFK airport, preparing to fly to Israel by way of Istanbul, for the start of the week of activities for Champions of the Flyway. From here on out, most of my communications on the event will likely be via social media. You can follow the hashtag #COTF2016 on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. You can see updates on my social media channels and on those of Bird Watcher's Digest.
Let me leave you with the lyrics I wrote for this year's Champions event, "River of Birds in the Sky." You can hear the recording of the song and watch the video we made, on the Champions site, and on the BWD YouTube channel.
European turtle-doves are shot by the thousands annually in Greece.
Did you know that an estimated 20 million birds are killed each year while
migrating along the Mediterranean-Black Sea flyway? These birds are not dying
of natural causes. They are shot, trapped, netted, and captured by glue smeared
onto branches. This devastating "harvest" of wild birds is done by
people in the name of tradition. Birds are shot for sport. They are netted and
lured into traps for local markets where they are sold as food considered by
some to be a delicacy.
I'm sure you're as horrified as I am to learn this. But you may also be
thinking "Those people way over there in the Mediterranean region are
nuts! That would never happen here in the U.S!"
Humans have always had a love-hate relationship with birds—especially with
birds that occur is such large concentrations that there seems to be a
never-ending supply. Think passenger pigeon. What was once the most numerous
species on the planet was reduced—from billions to none—in the span of a single
human generation.
Men with shotguns used to line the Kittatinny Ridge in eastern Pennsylvania
just to shoot the passing hawks in the fall. They'd shoot so many of these
"vermin" that they'd pose proudly standing next to a pile of
carcasses. It used to happen in Cape May, too, during fall migration. And
elsewhere, I'm sure. Anywhere there were large concentrations of birds you'd
have somebody there with guns, having themselves a good old time.
Those days are gone now, here in North America. But they still are alive and
well in countries such as Cyprus, Greece, Malta, and even in France and Italy,
where this repulsive tradition continues. I'm not talking about legitimate
hunting here. I'm talking about people shooting hawks and storks and cranes and
cuckoos and lapwings and nightjars—simply for the heck of it. It's illegal, yet
local authorities often turn a blind eye or cite their lack of jurisdiction on
private property.
White-eared bulbul.
There have been a number of campaigns against this illegal killing. One I've
recently become involved in was started by my friends Jonathan Meyrav and Dan Alon of the
Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI), with assistance from
BirdLife International.
Israel sits at the bottleneck of the migration route
between Eurasia and Africa, which makes it a world-class birding hotspot. And
while none of the shooting or trapping happens in Israel, it does in many of
the other countries along the flyway.
Jonathan and his colleagues at SPNI came up with the idea of a birding
competition during spring migration in Eilat, Israel's southernmost city. They
called it Champions of the Flyway and invited teams from all over the world to
come to compete for a number of prize categories. You can learn all about the Champions of the Flyway here on
the event website.
Teams scouting for the 2014 Champions race.
Most importantly, the Champions event was designed to raise money through
online donations and corporate sponsorship, all of which goes to a single
BirdLife partner along the flyway each year for use in the battle against the
illegal killing of wild birds. In 2014, the money went to the Bird
Conservation Georgia in the former Soviet republic. In 2015, the cause was BirdLife
Cyprus. And in 2016, it's the BirdLife partner in Greece, the Hellenic
Ornithological Society.
I took a team over to the inaugural Champions event in Eilat in 2014 and had
a great time. Our team, the Way-off Coursers, raised more than $3,000 for the
conservation fund.
The BWD Champions Team in 2014: George Armistead, Michael O'Brien, yours truly, and Ben Lizdas (behind the camera).
I missed the 2015 event. But when my good friend Jonathan
Meyrav asked me to write a song for this year's Champions of the Flyway, I
couldn't say no.
After a lot of writing and a bit of cogitating, a song began to take shape.
The result is "River of Birds in the Sky," an anthem for the birds and for their Champions.
I recorded the song with my band, The Rain Crows, and with the help of some
special birder-musician friends—in fact everyone who helped record the song is
a birder! I am incredibly pleased with the song and the video we put together
to accompany it. Here's the video and song.
So the Way-off Coursers are back, and we're truly honored and excited about
participating in this year's Champions of the Flyway competition. We've decided
to do a Big Sit in Eilat's famous birdwatching park. We're going to conserve
resources (ours included) and let the birds come to us.
If you'd like to help us reach our goal to raise $5,000 to help stop illegal
killing along the Mediterranean flyway, please visit our team page on the
Champions website.
You can follow along during our Big Sit on Twitter (@billofthebirds,
@bwdmag, @flywaychampions, #COTF2016, #riverofbirds) and Facebook. We'll
appreciate any sharing you can do and any contribution you can make.
Man, you go away for a fortnight, and while you're gone, all the spring birds start arriving! Just in at the farm this week: fox sparrow, chipping sparrow, tree swallow...
Fox sparrow. We had three under the deck feeder yesterday morning.
The chippies got in this morning, according to my sources at Indigo Hill. Eating suet dough they were.
Red-winged blackbirds, common grackles, and brown-headed cowbirds all got in a week or so ago. With these first two waves of arrivals, I'm left to wonder: can the blue-gray gnatsnatchers be far behind?
We left the Snowbird Lodge high in the Wasatch Mountains before dawn, dropping down to the desert along this large briny inland sea. Our trip consisted of two huge touring coaches, each one loaded with excited bird-heads.
Our first stop was along the causeway leading to the park entrance. So this is the Great Salt Lake. The smell of fermenting brine shrimp came onto the coach to meet us. Rugged plum-colored mountains surrounded the lake at a distance. Shallow brackish water bracketed the road. The water was so shallow that huge areas of salty sandflats appeared here and there, and the movement of birds and insects was obvious everywhere we looked. Stepping off of the bus I noticed several flocks of swift shorebirds flying overhead. They were buoyant fliers, snipelike in shape, but stiltlike in their gracefulness.
I was momentarily puzzled.
Then it hit me—just as someone else shouted "Wilson's phalaropes going overhead!"
Of course!
Wilson's phalaropes overhead, flying to join the huge feeding flocks on the Great Salt Lake.
Flock after flock, each one with between 12 and 30 birds, flew overhead, all headed in the same direction.
"Look at ALL those phalaropes!" I heard myself exclaim. I'd never seen so many at once.
"If you think that's a lot. Look out there, over the water!" said a birder next to me.
There, swirling over the water about 300 yards out were CLOUDS of phalaropes. They looked more like swarms of insects than flocks of birds. And they were reportedly ALL Wilson's phalaropes, staging, molting, and gorging before heading south for the winter. Every June, as soon as they have finished nesting up north, the phalaropes begin gathering at the Great Salt Lake. As many as half a million may use the lake as a resting and feeding stop on their southward migration.
These birds, in a few weeks, would make a non-stop flight to northern South America. There they'll spend the winter on inland lakes high in the Argentinian Andes—a journey of more than 5,000 miles.
Red-necked phalaropes also pass through the Great Salt Lake, but not in such staggering numbers.
The appearance of these post-breeding phalaropes coincides with the large hatches of brine flies, small harmless insects that form their own dark clouds. The phalaropes and other birds gorge on the abundant brine flies, as well as the equally abundant brine shrimp, putting on body fat that will fuel their long migration.
Here it was, just the last week of June and already fall migration was on for these phalaropes.
I'll share a few images of the distant clouds of Wilson's phalaropes from our morning at Antelope Island State Park.
Like a wave above the water's surface, thousands of phalaropes shifted to new feeding spots.
The flocks were constantly ebbing and flowing.
This was just one small portion of the flock. It extended twice this far to each side of my camera's frame.
This must have been what flocks of passenger pigeons looked like 200 years ago.
Last night's full moon was glorious in its ascent, rising up behind the hills to the east of the farm. By 9:00 pm it had cleared the trees and illuminated the meadow with its pale light.
But tonight's full moon had a secret. It was going into hiding just before it set.
When the clouds cleared about 5 am, Julie woke me up and we slipped outside to witness the lunar eclipse. In the image above the moon is just emerging from total eclipse, where the Earth passes between the moon and the sun, casting its shadow over the moon's surface. My images are blurry because I do not have a cable release for my camera (yet), so the tremor of pushing the shutter button causes some distortion. Each exposure lasted more than 10 seconds.
Shortly after the total eclipse, the moon gained a bright edge as the Earth moved out of alignment with the sun. Clouds and the moon's dropping behind the western horizon stopped the show here. We could hear migrant warblers calling overhead in the dark. A screech-owl temolo-ed from the ashes by the garage. From the sumac tangle along the north border a yellow-billed cuckoo called, cu-cu-cu-cu.
Full moons often affect me. I get clumsy--stubbing toes and bumping my head. I get edgy. I can't sit still, can't sleep deeply. I wonder if it's the same for birds, and that's why they get that migratory restlessness, or zugunruhe, when the moon is full...
Bill Thompson III is the editor of Bird Watcher's Digest by day. He's also a keen birder, the author of many books, a dad, a field trip leader, an ecotourism consultant, a guitar player, the host of the "This Birding Life" podcast, a regular speaker/performer on the birding festival circuit, a gentleman farmer, and a fungi to be around. His North American life list is somewhere between 673 and 675. His favorite bird is the red-headed woodpecker. His "spark bird" was a snowy owl. He has watched birds in 25 countries and 44 states. But his favorite place to watch birds is on the 80-acre farm he shares with his wife, artist/writer Julie Zickefoose. Some kind person once called Bill "The Pied Piper of Birding" and he has been trying to live up to that moniker ever since.
