Well, the rain got here a little “too” early… 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.
I could tell last night, when I was driving home from work, that the weather was moving a bit ahead of schedule. After sunset, though, it became obvious that while some birds over central and northern New Jersey would take flight to the north, the Delmarva Peninsula would stay quiet. Aghh, such is migration. If you check out the regional composite, you’ll see that we were smack dab in the middle of a “dead zone”, while migration was evident to our south, west, and north. Expect some turnover (mostly exodus) at places like Garret Mountain, but little influx into the southern part of the state today. The Sandy Hook buoy is reading southeast winds, which means that Derek Lovitch is in town and therefore birding on The Hook will be slow (but we’re stoked that our 5th teammate is finally arriving today!). It looks like we’ll have to wait until Thursday night to see the next push of migrants, as tonight the winds will be out of the northeast… but when it does happen, I expect the next flight to be big!
Good birding, and scouting,
David
3 responses to “The Storm Before the Birds”
This AM went on the patio to do put up some fuschia plants for hummers and heard what turned out to be a Hooded Warbler in the wet woods behind our house. We had nice looks and also discovered a Swainson’s Thrush foraging and heard a Louisiana Waterthrush along the brook. We also heard American Redstart and Blackpoll Warbler. The Waterthrush is new for us for our development. The wet woods is very small and narrow so all these birds will be moving on shortly.
If the weather hadn’t been so crummy, Garret might have exploded with birds. Still, we had a pretty good morning at Garret (though we had to work with fogged-up bins and zero sunshine), with around 15 species of warbler, plus countless Swainson’s Thrushes and Ovenbirds, and Lincoln’s Sparrow, plus the more common migrants.
Nice sightings, Wendy! You should have a few more birds in your wet woods on Friday morning, as the migration tomorrow night is looking quite promising.