We should start seeing a little more diversity today, as the Eastern Seaboard got a jolt of migration activity overnight last night. Here’s the radar from sunset last night through 5:00am this morning.
Frames are every 1/2 hour. Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized animation.
High pressure and southerly winds last night triggered migration from Texas to Florida and all the way up into the Northeast. Unlike previous events, though, the eastern seaboard appears to have gotten a fairer share of this push of birds. While still not a “floodgate” event, birds could be seen entering the Mid-Atlantic on a SW->NE trajectory throughout the night. Reports of night flight call activity support this idea as well, with both Great Blue Heron (T. Reed, New Brunswick, NJ) and Green Heron (G. Davis, Ocean City, NJ) being noted. Migration hotspots should hold new birds today, especially those near the coast such as Sandy Hook. I’ll be hitting Higbee’s via bicycle as a little experiment to see if and when this place can be good during spring migration (okay, so the IF is pretty much worked out- but the WHEN is still up for debate).
Good Birding
David
One response to “A nice coastal push of nocturnal migrants”
this place is always interesting, regardless of the number of birds.
So I rode my bike up to the dike at Higbee’s, wondering if there would be a morning flight. In short, there wasn’t. The wind was light and out of the south, but short of a few Am. Robins and various icterids (BHCO, COGR, RWBL, and a single BTGR), very little was flying north (or south) over the dike between 6:40 and 7:20am.
Highlights were a few hundred Northern Gannet heading out of the bay, a couple hundred Scoter, both Black and Surf, an adult Bald Eagle took two passes overhead, a Black-crowned Night Heron heading north, as were six Great Blue Herons.
A quick walk around Higbees, though, did produce several FOS birds for me, although each of them was represented only by a single individual. Ruby-crowned Kinglet (seen in the first field south of the parking lot, although I did hear one from the dike), White-eyed Vireo, and Blue-gray Gnatcatcher (both were in the second field to the south, on the west side of the field, where the large junipers are snapped from the winter storms). Otherwise it was more of the regulars, such as Yellow-rumped Warbler, Hermit Thrush, Brown Thrasher, etc. Six Chipping Sparrows were along the roadside at the Hidden Valley entrance on New England Rd, as was a single Wild Turkey between the intersection of Bayshore & New England Rd. and Hidden Valley.