View from the Field: Morning Flight, 14 September 2015

I don't often throw this word around, but today was EPIC!!!!!
56,636 warblers

We are still trying to fathom what took place just after sunrise today. It was unbelievable.

I am done with predictions folks; the mysteries of migration need to be unveiled by its perception in the now. The standard advice will still hold: check the forecasts; eye up the radar; ground-truth that stuff in the field, 24-7. But sometimes, you just can't know it all, or foresee its magnitude.

I positioned myself in a 20 mph WNW-W wind and set-up my Morning Flight gizmos at 25 minutes till dawn. Tom Reed showed up soon after and looked giddy, but still not much sign of the pending Warbler-Geddon was in the air. The pre-sunrise 15 minute counting segment gave us 39 birds-- signs of Warblerpocalypse (aka Monday morning warbler-blitz) that was about to ensue! Sun-up to 10 minutes into the day, and 1,779 things, barely identified, already hopelessly under-counted, shot through their and our collective chaos.

'We need help here, and we need to get a handle on the upcoming situation'. Mike Lanzone and David La Puma showed up in the course of this time. Mike asked me if I got the Connecticut Warbler that shot out in front of them down on the road. I stared him down for 5 seconds and slowly shook my head, missing probably 50 warblers in that moment.

With La Puma at the helm of the Specteo software and Tom, Mike, and I armed with two clickers each, we set out to make sense of the rest of that first hour. Clearly, the flight was "kick-'started" by American Redstart, the most abundant of the neotropical warblers in all years of the count. We clicked our clickers furiously for 40-50 minutes, counting by tens, to try and keep up with what we could ID as redstarts and what just got lost in the wash-- the catch-all warbler sp. category. The trees were spawning birds at an incredible rate. Many troops in the Higbee fields had mouths agape for that hour and helped corroborate our estimates of the overall flight composition.

To realize later on, that this day's identified American Redstart total was well-beyond every past YEAR total was just to much too handle. Add to that what we actually estimate as the percentage composition of the total flight 40,729 or 71% redstart, at an absolute, conservative minimum, and we are going over the moon. This historic flight was 'Started indeed.

And the flight started just as quickly as it ended. This flight was 90% over already, 40 minutes after dawn. It was like burning embers in a forest fire. I can come up with no other conceivable explanation except that a huge hit of birds settled into the Higbee dunes and/or perhaps were stuck south in the mouth of the Delaware Bay sometime before dawn, and just flew and fought for their lives. With continental declines across the boards in our warbler numbers, it is heartening to see such a capacity left. Though I question if new weather patterns are driving this mechanism toward more deadly fallout potentials. Prepare to be enriched by future CMBO posts about the situation on the radar over the course of that night and the data that we humbly collected.

Species
Ruby-throated Hummingbird	25
Northern Flicker	1
Eastern Wood-Pewee	1
Empidonax sp.	2
Eastern Kingbird	16
Philadelphia Vireo	3
Red-eyed Vireo	38
Veery	6
European Starling	246
Cedar Waxwing	5
Ovenbird	3
Worm-eating Warbler	2
Northern Waterthrush	45
Black-and-white Warbler	505
Prothonotary Warbler	1
Tennessee Warbler	7
Nashville Warbler	13
Connecticut Warbler	2
Common Yellowthroat	19
American Redstart	8,724
Hooded Warbler	1
Cape May Warbler	8
Northern Parula	479
Magnolia Warbler	18
Bay-breasted Warbler	4
Blackburnian Warbler	2
Yellow Warbler	38
Chestnut-sided Warbler	73
Blackpoll Warbler	20
"Baypoll" warbler	2
Black-throated Blue Warbler	87
Palm Warbler	158
Yellow-rumped Warbler	1
Black-throated Green Warbler	53
Canada Warbler	1
Wilson's Warbler	5
warbler sp.	46,365
Scarlet Tanager	2
Rose-breasted Grosbeak	8
Blue Grosbeak	1
Bobolink	62
Baltimore Oriole	36
Total warblers	56.636
Total	57,088
estimated American Redstart	40,729
estimated Black-and-white Warbler	4,346
estimated Northern Parula	2,544