Light WSW winds over NY State and Pennsylvania last night couldn’t stop the migration-ready birds from heading south. Along the coast, though, migration was much quieter. Here’s the radar from 7:30pm last night through 5:00am this morning.

Frames are every 1/2 hour. Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized animation.

Upper-level winds over central NY State last night were from the west at 10kts, southwesterly at 5-10kts over NYC, and more southerly over the Delmarva. Migration-ready birds will definitely move on light south winds, and it looks like birds did just that over NY with moderate densities heading SE from Albany and S from Binghamton throughout the night and early this morning. Most of these birds are destined for Pennsylvania while a few should also end up in northern and western NJ by this morning. New Jersey (even the western boundary) is still on the edge of this flight distribution so don’t expect any major concentrations locally, although the best bets for today will be fall migrant traps along the Delaware River. Otherwise small numbers of birds did move across the state and should be dispersed throughout the landscape this morning.

I do expect a significant flight into the mid-Atlantic on Friday and Saturday nights but right now the forecast for strong NW winds just isn’t shaping up… so we’ll have to see if conditions change in favor of a really big fall flight into NJ as the next cold front clears this weekend.

Good Birding

David