Morning Flight - Monday, October 1, 2018

And just like that, the stupendous numbers of birds from this weekend have (mostly) vanished into the ether known only as “elsewhere.” It was thankfully still cool out, but SW winds from the receding front greeted me at the Higbee dike this morning. These winds are less than ideal for Morning Flight, but they can be good for seeing western vagrant songbirds like Townsend’s Warbler, Black-throated Gray Warbler, Lark Sparrow, Lark Bunting, and Say’s Phoebe. Individuals of all of these species have been found across the Northeast and mid-Atlantic in the past couple of days, so perhaps we will get one of these stunners past the count this week!

In terms of actual, non-hypothetical birds, species composition this morning was similar to yesterday’s, but greatly reduced in abundance. Lots of birds were moving in both directions far to the east this morning. A healthy number of flickers were moving almost equally in both directions, some early morning American Robins headed south (which we had an early influx of this weekend) along with several dozen Blue Jays.

While there were a decent number of warblers moving out there as well, without much wind drift to coax these birds into hugging the coast, I had to leave the majority of them as spuhs. Still, we had handfuls of Blackpolls, Parulas, Redstarts, Palms, and Yellow-rumps come close past the dike. With the arrival of October, we are fighting tooth and nail for every Neotropical warbler we can get around here before the last of them depart for their wintering grounds! We can still see a good few of the later warblers like Cape Mays, Blackpolls, and Northern Parulas mixed in with the Yellow-rumps and Palms through mid-October.

The event of the morning was a late Upland Sandpiper circled around the dike before apparently dropping down at the far end of the dike, although attempts to find it on the ground were unsuccessful. Shortly thereafter, a Sharp-shinned Hawk came in low along the lip of the dike and made a dive for a Red-breasted Nuthatch!

In fall, here there are songbirds, there are Sharpies..

As always, you can find our official count totals on Trektellen here, and our complete eBird checklist of the day’s observations here.

Bring on the next day!