Morning Flight - Tuesday, September 4, 2018

The heat and humidity of this morning had observers on the dike feeling more like they were Georgia or Dagobah than Cape May during the fall. Although the light westerly winds that had been forecast failed to materialize on the ground, there were still some birds moving. It is still September after all!

71 northbound American Redstarts headlined the warbler abundance, with the usual early season cast of Black-and-white Warbler, Northern Waterthrush, Yellow Warbler, Northern Parula, and Prairie Warbler trailing behind. For extra diversity, we had Black-throated Blue, Chestnut-sided Warbler, the first Palm Warbler of the season, and one each of Worm-eating and Blue-winged Warbler. A handful of Red-eyed Vireos, Red-breasted Nuthatches and gnatcatchers plus a lone Dickcissel rounded things out on the non-warbler front.

Check out those rictal bristles! Insects beware!

It’s worth noting that we’re just starting to see mixed flocks move with chickadees through the groves of walnuts, cherries, and other trees in the area surrounding the dike. In a certain sense, it’s more challenging to pick them out of the trees from all the way up on dike than it is to identify them purely in flight!

While today was dismal by Cape May’s (heavily skewed) standards, it was still wonderful by any absolute measure. If someone had told beginning-birder me that you could see scores of American Redstarts in a single day, I wouldn’t have believed it! I simply didn’t realize that abundance like that still existed in the modern age.   

Not a second thought was paid to the odd primate pointing a clicking machine at it.

So yes, we sorely need a cold front and aren’t likely to get one for a bit. And yes, we’re gravely concerned about the severe declines of migratory songbirds. And we’re also troubled by climate change and how it may be creating more “summer-like” falls (which our long-term migration monitoring data should be able to tell us more about). But despite all of that, we can’t allow ourselves to forget the simple joy of witnessing migrating birds, because that’s what we have to stand up for and protect in this human-dominated era. We’ll continue bearing witness, because that’s what we do here.

As always, you can find the link to the official count on Trektellen here and the complete eBird checklist here.

Bring on Day 36!