Morning Flight, 23 August 2015

Wow, I love watching, counting, and trying to understand the phenomenon at Morning Flight! Sometimes when it rains, it pours. Or perhaps today's flow of good birds could be likened to a series of flash floods, or pop-up thunderstorms. The light, late-summer cold front that swept through the Cape two days ago was still cranking out good "neotrop" birds at the dike today.

Yes, it was flash-flooding Baltimore Orioles, Eastern Kingbirds, and American Redstarts this morning. With over 300 of each flying north during the four hours we watched. Mixed in were other goodies: Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Least Flycatcher, Yellow-throated Vireo, Ovenbird, Prothonotary Warbler; and many other "classic" Morning Flight species like: Blue-winged, Magnolia, Bay-breasted, and Blackburnian Warblers. They came in punctuated bursts, a real all or nothing affair. I speculate that this particular action could have been set-off by the excitement of the kingbirds and especially the orioles.

The new data-recording and live, online streaming technology provided by Ornicept was really put to the test with this kind of flight and it continued to work wonderfully! The next six or so days hold a lot of promise with the weather-- Thursday, the 27th, looks especially good right now.

If you can't see it in person you can catch all the action at https://raptor.specteo.com/cape-may-bird-observatory/morning-flight/

Hope you can catch up with the fun!