Category Archives: Birds and Birding

The Ten Craziest Massachusetts Bird Noises

Posted on July 23, 2018 by William Freedberg

If you’ve never heard a male Snowy Egret nasally bubble away at a rival, well, you are in for a treat.

Using Xeno-canto, an online library of bird sounds to which anyone can contribute, we’ve chased down the strangest recordings of species native to Massachusetts. Hit the play button in the clips below to check them out!

In the first half of this post, we’ll run through some strange bird noises that are easy to go out and hear for yourself.

We’ll review even weirder noises in the second half, but ones that are hard or impossible to experience in Massachusetts. This second section is devoted to noises that migratory birds make on their breeding grounds far to the north, or in other parts of their range.

Part 1: Sounds You Can Hear in Massachusetts

1. American Bittern:

Distant relatives of herons, bitterns make a booming, gulping noise while pumping their necks up and down, giving them the nickname “thunder-pumper.” Hit the play button in this clip and turn up the bass!

An American Bittern stands tall among marsh grasses. Photo (c) William Freedberg

2. Bobolink:

A once-common sound of farm fields and grasslands, the Bobolink’s song incongruously brings to mind R2-D2 from Star Wars. These grassland birds abounded during the height of low-impact agriculture in New England, but farmland loss, development, intensive harvesting and pesticide use have reduced their numbers dramatically. With recent conservation programs like the Bobolink Project, which pays farmers directly to protect grassland birds, this species’ future is looking a little brighter.

3. Veery:

Veeries are drab, russet-colored thrushes with an outsized voice. They can produce several clear tones at once, and almost sound like they are harmonizing with themselves. While uncommon near developed areas, this birds are one of the most numerous summer birds of deep forest far from the coast.

4. Barred Owl:

Owls don’t just hoot—they also can yelp, screech, and shriek. This Barred Owl transitions from a high-pitched wail (which may be a regionalism or an alarm call) into its lower and more commonly-heard “who-cooks-for-you-all.”

5. Common Loon:

Perhaps the most iconic sound on this list, the wail of the Common Loon is practically synonymous with the wilderness of northern New England (although they also breed in central Massachusetts). In this recording, listen for their yodels at the beginning, a loud wail at 0:31, and keening starting at 0:09 and 0:58.

Part 2: Sounds Massachusetts Birds Make Elsewhere

6. Snowy Egret:

This might be the weirdest one on the list. Graceful Snowy Egrets are common in New England saltmarshes, but rarely vocalize away from rookeries. At rookeries, however, they’re known for a cartoon character-like and downright hilarious.

A Snowy Egret patrolling the shallows for prey. Photo (c) William Freedberg

7. Pectoral Sandpiper:

Pectoral Sandpipers and many other species of shorebirds seem like much different animals on their breeding grounds than on the east coast during migration: they become quite fearless and territorial, their plumage takes on dramatic patterns, and they sing with a surprising variety of chortles, whoops and whistles. This Pectoral Sandpiper’s song sort of sounds like… somebody blowing bubbles?

8. Turkey Vulture:

Turkey Vultures almost never vocalize. When they do, all that comes out is a raspy, sizzling hiss, like adding water to a hot pan.

9. Atlantic Puffin:

While puffins are uncommon winter visitors to the waters off MA, you can easily hear their characteristic grumbles on breeding colonies in Maine.

10: Great Shearwater:

These pelagic, albatross-like birds are frequently encountered on whale watches and offshore boat trips in Massachusetts waters. While silent at sea, they’re… really quite vocal on breeding colonies, where they sound like rubber chickens brought to life.

A Great Shearwater, true to its name, glides tight to the waves. Photo (c) William Freedberg

These are just our picks for the strangest noises made by local birds… but there are so many other options, it’s hard to winnow them down to just a few!

What would make your top 10? Let us know in the comments!

Bird Conservation on the Road in Iceland

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Jon Atwood

Hrisey Island © Margo Servison

From June 12–21 two members of the Bird Conservation team, Jon Atwood and Margo Servison, were privileged to visit Iceland with a Mass Audubon Natural History Tour. Along with 14 other travelers, we saw incredible geology, waterfalls, geysers, flowers, sea cliffs, and landscapes that can only be described as ‘otherworldly’. Oh, and lots of birds—74 species, the majority of which are seldom seen in North America, and nearly all of which were seen by all trip participants.

European Golden-Plover © Margo Servison

It was an amazing experience, to be in a world where the dominant bird species were shorebirds, waterfowl, and seabirds—there were only about 10 species of songbirds. Black-tailed Godwits, Red-necked Phalaropes, Gyrfalcon (even including a nest with 3 chicks), Atlantic Puffin, and European Golden-Plover were the trip favorites. And our super-fabulous local tour guide (Trausti Gunnarsson), one of those people who knows everything about everything, made the trip far more than simply a great birding experience.

Red-necked Phalarope © Margo Servison

To join Mass Audubon on two NEW Iceland birding tours next year, watch this website.

Wildlife and Birding in Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks

Posted on July 18, 2018 by Wayne Petersen

While it’s true that Mass Audubon regularly sponsors outstanding wildlife and birding trips to exotic corners of the planet, the Natural History Travel Program also features domestic departures that rival some of the finest wildlife spectacles on the planet. One of these is the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem—a region covering approximately 34,375 square miles in the northwestern corner of Wyoming, but also extending into Idaho and Montana. Comprised of more than 2.2 million acres, this scenically magnificent region with an elevation averaging over 7500’ hosts the largest concentration of wildlife in the United States outside of Alaska, including the largest free-ranging herd of American Bison in the world, one of the largest American Elk herds in North America, and one of very few Grizzly Bear populations in the contiguous United States. And thanks to a repatriation effort in the mid-1990s, Yellowstone supports 11 packs of Gray Wolves numbering approximately 110 individuals.

Bison © David Parish

From June 12-22, Mass Audubon President, Gary Clayton and Important Bird Areas Director, Wayne Petersen were able to share 21 species of mammals and 133 species of birds with an appreciative and congenial group of colleagues and clients in this extravagantly beautiful region. Among the trip’s highlights was a wolf pack trying (in vain) to take down a young Pronghorn, baby bison practically at every turn, a Golden Eagle at its nest, a Dipper feeding and teaching a young one how to swim and dive, a fine variety of waterfowl including several pairs of rare Trumpeter Swans, and hosts of colorful wildflowers. In addition, the food was hearty and fine throughout, the weather was variable but comfortable, and canoodling Grizzly Bears and Moose and Black Bears with young were consistently voted as favorites. One of the most intact temperate zone ecosystems in the world, the Yellowstone is a region like few others and is destination that every American should see at least once in their life!

Pronghorn © David Parish

Field Notes from the Quabbin: Moose Mamas and Magnolia Warblers

Posted on July 16, 2018 by William Freedberg

A Magnolia Warbler perches in a shrub. Photo by William Freedberg

A late-June morning at the Quabbin Reservoir: Winter Wren songs echo from hollows and wetland thickets. Blackburnian Warblers whisper their buzzy, quiet notes from the canopy. Blue-headed Vireos squeak and argue over perches in spruce trees. These birds, like many species that prefer conifers or highland forests, are rarely seen outside of migration in eastern Massachusetts. At the Quabbin, it’s hard to miss them.

In the background there’s a constant clamor from the Quabbin’s most vocal and abundant woodland breeders: Red-eyed Vireos, Veeries, Ovenbirds, and Scarlet Tanagers.

Amid the birdsong, there’s the faint scratching of my pencil and clipboard. Point 4, Minute 1 // Scarlet Tanager. Male. Calling. 19 meters // Ovenbird. Unknown sex. Singing. 33 meters. The birds are a thick during dawn chorus, and between recording each species, sex, behavior, and distance from me, it’s hard to keep up. The survey period passes quickly, and it’s time to hike to the next count site.

The data we collected that morning will eventually be used by the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), an organization which studies large-scale environmental change at over 70 sites across the US, and which partners with Mass Audubon to collect bird data in New England. Normally, it takes just one person to run bird surveys—but recent security concerns at the Quabbin mean that all field technicians are now accompanied by a NEON escort to drive around restricted-access roads.

My field escort that day was Jamie, a soft-spoken botanist who had just moved to New England from Appalachia. When he mentioned he hoped to see his first moose in the Quabbin, I thought it was a farfetched idea, not knowing that around 100 moose make their year-round homes there. As if to prove a point, a cow moose stepped into the road later that day as we were on our way out.

A blurry, through-the-windshield photo of the moose that wouldn’t move.

We paused before inching the car towards the moose. The moose paused, too, and took several deliberate paces towards us. We noticed a smaller second pair of ears protruding from the roadside vegetation, and realized the moose was putting itself between us and its calf. That was our cue to put the car in reverse and give it some room; we would have to wait it out if we wanted to get to our destination safely.

Rolling down the windows, we were surprised to hear a singing Magnolia Warbler, a rare breeder for Central Massachusetts. The banana-yellow male flew across the road, giving us excellent looks at his black mask and bold stripes. I broke out a granola bar and Jamie unwrapped his lunch as we watched the moose feed and listened to the warblers. The mammoth ungulate in our way eventually ambled off, but we were in no rush to leave: life at the Quabbin was good.

America’s Biggest Ecological Monitoring Project

Posted on July 11, 2018 by William Freedberg

This summer, I’ve been surveying birds at the Quabbin Reservoir for Mass Audubon and NEON, the National Ecological Observatory Network. The deep forests and hollows of the Quabbin watershed host scarce breeders like Cerulean and Canada Warbler, along with most common woodland breeders in the state. The Quabbin’s size and diversity of intact habitats make it an ideal study site for a program like NEON.

NEON is an exciting project because of its scale. Funded by the National Science Foundation, the network comprises more than 80 sites across the country’s 20 ecoregions. At each site, NEON coordinates teams of scientists to keep tabs on a variety of ecological indicators. These include large-scale factors like water chemistry, greenhouse gasses, and tree cover, as well as narrower topics like fish DNA, bird diversity, and disease prevalence in ticks, mice and mosquitoes.

A Scarlet Tanager with insect prey, perched on a snag by the Quabbin. Photo by Will Freedberg.

NEON treats birds as one piece of a vast puzzle: by studying how long-term ecological trends line up with each other, the project aims to parse out the causes and consequences of environmental change.

Most importantly, all NEON data is free and publicly available. It’s fun to browse if you’re curious about any of these topics, but scientists can also leverage these massive datasets to answer specific questions about ecosystem function.

Strategies For Bird Surveys

Mass Audubon has been responsible for NEON’s bird data in New England since the project’s inception. Each year, we send observers (called “field technicians”) to monitor bird numbers and diversity at the Quabbin, as well as Bartlett Forest in New Hampshire.

A diagram showing the layout of bird survey points in a NEON grid. Adapted from Thibault (2015)

Technicians are responsible for surveying a number of randomly selected patches of forest, which are each divided into 3×3 grids of survey points. By standing in one place and counting birds at each evenly spaced point in a grid, the technicians minimize double-counting birds, and get a representative subsample of birds present in each grid.

Even skilled birders won’t detect every bird at a point. To get around this, NEON scientists adjust bird count data with models that account for birds that were present, but undetected by the observer.

Observers are also less likely to detect birds that are far away from them, and more likely to notice birds that are close by. So, field technicians record their distance from each bird with a rangefinder; distant birds are given more “weight” in the model for calculating actual bird abundance. This is based on the assumption that the technician recorded most nearby birds, but missed more that were further away.

Next week, I’ll be posting some entries from my field notebook, and a typical day in the life of a Mass Audubon/NEON bird technician. Stay tuned for some stories from the field.

The Warbler Connection: Bay-breasts and Budworms

Posted on July 3, 2018 by Wayne Petersen

Bay-breasted Warbler © Ian Davies

Massachusetts birders this spring were thrilled by the exceptional numbers of Bay-breasted Warblers present during the May migration. Joining these inflated Bay-breast numbers were also above average numbers of Cape May and Tennessee warblers. Was this a coincidence? Probably not. The key to their local abundance this spring probably lies in the fact that these boreal forest breeders are “spruce budworm specialists”.

The spruce budworm (Choristoneura fumiferana) is a small boreal forest moth whose larvae periodically undergo population explosions capable of destroying huge acreages of spruce/fir forest in Canada and beyond. Under normal circumstances, boreal forest breeding birds such as the “spruce budworm specialists” mentioned above, are major predators of spruce budworm caterpillars. When budworm populations periodically get out of control, the numbers of these budworm-eating warblers increase substantially wherever the irruption is taking place. When a superabundance of food exists, the warblers lay more eggs and successfully raise more young than in normal years, and often do so for several years in succession, or as long as the budworm outbreak persists.

Spruce Budworm © Jerald E. Dewey, USDA Forest Service

These “boom and bust” population cycles are similar to what periodically happens to lemmings in the Arctic, or to certain species of forage fish in the ocean (e.g., sand lance or menhaden). When these overabundances of food exist, certain predators are capable of maximizing either their reproductive output or their local abundance. Often the phenomenon causing a detectable local abundance is far removed from the actual cause of the event. Classic examples detectable in the Bay State are the recent major Snowy Owl irruptions of the winters of 2013-14 and 2017-18, and the menhaden/Great Shearwater event in Provincetown during the late summer of 2017. In the case of Snowy Owls, the lemming events responsible for the Snowy Owl irruptions into Massachusetts were far north in the Arctic, not locally in Massachusetts. However in the instance of the menhaden event, the factors leading to the Provincetown disaster were far more local and took place in Massachusetts’ nearshore waters.

To put the Bay-breasted Warbler event into an extravagant perspective, consider a third event that took place on May 28, 2018, on the north shore of the Saint Lawrence River near Tadoussac, Quebec. On this date six highly experienced observers tallied an estimated 144,324 Bay-breasted Warblers, 108,243 Cape May Warblers, and 72,162 Tennessee Warblers in nine hours! Partly responsible for these unprecedented and extraordinary one-day totals was a combination of weather events that created a “perfect migration storm”—the full details of which lie beyond the bounds of the current story.

Cape May Warbler © Ian Davies

More to the point, however, these massive and unprecedented numbers of “spruce budworm specialists” were part of what are almost certainly inflated populations of these species bound for budworm-besieged areas of boreal forest. What Massachusetts observers enjoyed this spring was clearly only a tip of a much larger iceberg whose full extent has likely been building slowly for several past breeding seasons but wasn’t fully revealed until May 28 at Tadoussac, Quebec!

Throwback Tuesday: Old And New Perspectives On Migration

Posted on May 22, 2018 by William Freedberg

Spring Migration: The Early Birders’ View

William Brewster, the famous 19th-century ornithologist and Cambridge resident, imagined that spring migrants preferred the rural countryside west of Boston to the woodlands near the city. But when he moved to Concord in 1892, he was surprised to find fewer migrants than he had become used to seeing in Cambridge.

Brewster’s student, Ludlow Griscom, hypothesized that this was the result of birds’ migratory routes. Brewster’s data, collected over decades, seemed to show that migrants did not move evenly across the state, but rather took routes based on the shape of the landscape.

Paraphrased, Griscom’s theory went like this: a big stream of birds passes up the mid-Atlantic coast, and two major contingents form in New York. One, with many inland migrants, would hit the Hudson river valley and follow it north, and the other would travel along the Connecticut coast. A small contingent of birds would then split off and follow the Housatonic River, and a major one would follow the Connecticut River Valley. The rest turn northeast just ahead of Narraganset Bay to avoid the pine barrens of southeastern Massachusetts and Cape Cod. These birds turn north near Boston Harbor, passing through Canton, Milton, Brookline and Cambridge, before continuing north into Essex County and along the New Hampshire coast.

Griscom and Brewster’s theory of migratory routes is roughly illustrated in this map:

Almost, But Not Quite

This particular set of routes has not been borne out by modern data gleaned from the radar. While some studies show that certain areas are regularly “birdier” than others during migration, (including sites along major river valleys), wind and weather patterns ultimately have more sway over bids’ trajectories than the topography of the landscape. Some expert birders still swear that migrating birds following “sight lines” or topographic features, but these observations remains anecdotal.

Even if migratory routes are not as fixed or as specific as Griscom imagined, radar does often show higher concentrations migrants in some areas than others. For example, in early May 2018, birds seemed to avoid southeastern Massachusetts and Boston, staying northwest of I-495. This is demonstrated on the radar maps below (note that the radar station is the white cross in the center of the circle, and that radar can detect birds equally in all directions- check out our blog series on reading radar images if you haven’t yet!) Bear in mind that these are by no means typical nights—birds take very different migratory paths through Massachusetts every night, mostly depending on wind direction and time of year.

While the radar doesn’t show nocturnal migrants grouping together in narrow ribbons in the air, compiling images like these helps scientists observe patterns in bird migration. For example, this map by Kyle Horton of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology shows the direction in which birds are heading. The length of each bar shows how many birds are flying in that direction over the course of a season. The key takeaway: many birds fly over the ocean from Massachusetts, preferring to take the direct route over the Gulf of Maine rather than follow the coastline.

This map was recently featured in an awesome video by Jackson Childs, a local birder and friend of Mass Audubon. Check out Jackson’s video for more cool information about bird migration, including dawn flight, and some close-up footage of colorful warblers.

If you’ve found surprising patterns in spring migration, let us know in the comments!

Long Legs and Filmy Filigree: A Visit to Kettle Island

Posted on May 15, 2018 by Wayne Petersen

Colonial-nesting waterbirds are always fascinating, and because so many species nest on remote or hard-to-get-to islands, a visit to a colony typically represents an adventure. And so it was when six intrepid staff members and volunteer bird counters visited Mass Audubon’s Kettle Island (a Massachusetts Important Bird Area) off the coast of Manchester-by-the-Sea last week. A 17 acre uninhabited rocky island approximately a mile offshore, much of the island is vegetated with a dense cover of low trees, shrubs, thorns, and copious amounts of poison ivy. One can view the island’s birdlife from a boat, but landing is prohibited in order not to disturb this important colonial waterbird nesting site.

Kettle Island bird team ©Craig Gibson

The purpose of the island visit was to census and survey the breeding long-legged wading birds that have nested on the island for several decades. The visit was part of a survey project initiated last year to assess the overall status and ecology of a number of islands off the Essex County coast, and also part of a greater coastal waterbird survey being jointly conducted by the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Mass Wildlife. One of the largest colonies in the Commonwealth, Kettle Island currently hosts Great Egrets (194 pairs), Snowy Egrets (99 pairs), Little Blue Herons (4 pairs), Black-crowned Night-Herons (30 pairs), and Glossy Ibises (9 pairs). In addition, the island sanctuary is currently home to 2 pairs of American Oystercatchers, 51 pairs of Herring Gulls, and 79 pairs of Great Black-backed Gulls.

One of the magical aspects of visiting a breeding island at this season is seeing some of our most spectacular breeding species in their full breeding plumage—plumages that brought many species virtually to their knees in the heyday of the millinery trade during the late 1800s and early 1900s when their feathery filigree was central to the egregious fashion industry of the day. Not only did the excesses of this worldwide feather lust bring the founding mothers of Mass Audubon to rise up in outrage in 1896, but it was this same excessive slaughter of egrets, herons, and other birds that ultimately led to the establishment of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act 100 years ago this year.

Thanks to these two historic conservation milestones, today bird watchers, photographers, artists, and everyone who enjoys beautiful living things is able to see these handsome species seasonally inhabiting the coastlines and salt marshes of Massachusetts when they are not nesting on their remote island colonies.

Please consider supporting our bird conservation work by making a donation today. Thank you!

Finding Your First Whip-poor-will

Posted on May 14, 2018 by William Freedberg

Photo by David Larson

A drab bird with a startling call, the Whip-poor-will’s perfect camouflage belies its incredible voice. This nocturnal hunter can broadcast its loud, rhythmic whistle as many as 10,000 times over the course of one night. Wherever Whip-poor-wills live, their sound is as much a part of a summer evening as the familiar chirp of crickets and the whirr of cicadas.

Where’d All The Whip-poor-wills Go?

“Whip-poor-will” is practically a household name. But far more people have heard of them than have actually heard their call. This is no accident—the species has been in trouble since the turn of the 20^th century.

Whip-poor-wills’ decline has largely followed the decline of large moths, their favorite food. Recently, a landmark study showed that Whip-poor-wills and other insect-eating birds have been feeding on less and less nutritious prey, as their choices are diminished by pesticide use and habitat destruction.

The Key to Whip-poor-will Habitat

Whip-poor-wills have two main habitat requirements. Firstly, their preference for the largest insects means they require healthy ecosystems that can support Luna moths, Catocala moths, and big grasshoppers. Whip-poor-wills will avoid areas with urban or suburban development, or where pesticide spraying reduces the numbers of large insects. This does not mean that they are averse to open areas—Whip-poor-wills are often found in small agricultural fields, as long as there is little or no chemical disturbance.

Secondly, Whip-poor-wills avoid forests with thick understories and midstory vegetation. While they prefer habitats with some tree cover, they need an open midstory to snatch insects on the wing, and they need bare ground to perch. They are often found in open woodland like pine barrens, as well as small open areas near denser wooded ecosystems—but rarely, if ever, in large tracts of dense thickets.

Sites to Search for Whip-poor-wills

Most places in Massachusetts no longer fit the above criteria with the exceptions of the southeastern and central-west part of the state.

In Plymouth County, try driving the roads of Myles Standish State Forest just after dark.

On Cape Cod, the pine barrens of Wellfleet and Truro often have high densities of Whip-poor-wills; roads through pine barrens between route 6 and the Atlantic beaches are reliable, and even residential roads adjacent to pine barrens can be productive. Crane Wildlife Management Area on the upper cape is also great.

Closer to Boston, you’ll occasionally have luck in the Blue Hills Reservation and on ranger-led programs at Parker River National Wildlife Refuge on Plum Island (which closes at dusk).

Most places around Quabbin Reservoir and the wilder areas of the Connecticut River Valley are excellent for Whip-poor-wills, but few human observers look there at night. If you see a Whip-poor-will out there, report it on eBird, or let us know in the comments!

Predicting Spring Migration: Part 3

Posted on May 7, 2018 by William Freedberg

(This is the final installment in a series on birding by radar. Read the first and second post first so this one makes sense!)

On May 20, 2017, Bay-breasted Warblers seemed to drip from every tree at Mass Audubon’s Marblehead Neck Wildlife Sanctuary. Birders tallied dozens of this normally scarce migrant practically on arrival, alongside equally impressive numbers of Canada Warblers, Blackburnian Warblers, and other migrants. The air filled with high-pitched warbler songs so much that it was difficult to distinguish one from the next. Plum Island was equally loaded, with some observers tallying 123 species for the day. Was this a fallout, or just an excellent day for migration?

Fallout is one of the most exciting spectacles a birder can hope to experience in migration. Serious birders mistakenly use this term all the time to mean “a lot of migrants in one area,” but fallout refers to a very specific phenomenon: birds that cut short their migratory journey due to severe weather or exhaustion.

Birds will fall out along the coast if they are blown far off course over the ocean; they return to land hungry and tired, and large numbers feed at ground-level in coastal vegetation. Fast-moving fronts of severe weather can also cause fallouts when they interrupt bands of migrating birds, and stationary fronts can stall migrants that land when they encounter it and build up along its edge.

On May 20^th, 2017, birders who read the radar saw that northeastern Massachusetts experienced a borderline fallout; a storm had blown birds against the coast and over the ocean, but the weather cleared early enough that many grounded birds continued migrating afterwards. Regardless, the superb birding that day was undeniably predictable.

Reading the Radar on May 20, 2017

The radar for this night showed moderate migration, with a front of severe weather pushing birds south and east. The dense (green and red) precipitation is pictured up against a group of birds, represented by the blue line between the edge of the storm and the mass of birds in the center of the frame.

As the front moved east (see below), the density of migrants increased just to its south. The birds at the edge of the storm, pictured in blue above, appear to have been pushed into the main mass of birds, where they show up as a streak of green (higher-density) in the image below.

The velocity map below paints a slightly different picture. The black areas between the storm and the birds show that the storm is grounding birds. But the birds just away from the edge—that red spur in New Hampshire, for example—are not getting pushed south by it.

The red color (that is, increased relative velocity reading) of that patch of birds shows that they are either 1) continuing to fly east but increasing their speed or 2) flying north instead of east, as if to go around the storm, and maintaining their speed. In either case, the fact that these birds are being detected further away from the station than the rest of the cluster indicates that they increased their flying altitude (recall that the further away birds are from the station, the higher they need to be to show up on the radar). It’s anybody’s guess why they would be doing this; the storm exists at a higher altitude than the birds, so flying up into it seems counterintuitive.

What Was Missing

Since the front passed fairly early in the evening, many migrants had a chance to pick themselves up and move along after the storm passed. It is not a reach to imagine that the birds that built up along the edge of the storm took off again after the storm passed, and moved northeast again, landing in similar areas along the Maine coast.

What Looked Promising

Storm or no storm, a forecast of west winds turning northwest at dawn is always a good sign for coastal sites. West winds blow inland migrants against the coast, where many prefer to land instead of flying over the water. Other birds overshoot the coast in strong winds, and when winds turn northwest at dawn, these ambitious flyers drop back in at coastal sites like Plum Island and Marblehead Neck.

The Results

A small but significant stream of birds poured off the ocean and onto the coast in the morning. Some experts say that this was strictly because they were pushed east by the storm, but some hold that these birds would have overshot the coast with the west wind anyway. In either case, velocity readings from early (4:30-5:30) the next morning show many birds over the ocean colored in yellows, olives, and some blue: birds that are not moving directly away from or directly towards the radar station. In some areas, this means they were moving towards the coast.

Arrows on this map indicating bird direction were determined by drawing a line from the radar station (circled) out to a point with birds, and then drawing an arrow slightly over 90 degrees to this line for birds moving slightly away from the station (yellow).

Likewise, the arrow would be at exactly 90 degrees to the line for birds moving neither towards nor away from the station, slightly under 90 degrees to the line for birds moving slightly towards the station (light blues and greys) and in the direction (or close to it) of the line for birds moving strongly towards or away from the station (colored red or deep blue). If you didn’t follow this, don’t worry: the key is that birds over the water at dawn often means coastal fallout.

To sum it up, there were three elements of that evening’s radar that practically screamed “Go birding on the coast tomorrow”:

Radar showing many birds moving more east than north, and some shooting over the coast at high speed
A strong storm that could force migrants against the coast even more vigorously than the winds could, and might even ground many of them.
Most importantly, birds coming in off the ocean early in the morning (4:30-5:30).

Lo and behold, it was an incredible day on the coast the following morning, even though arguments over how much the early-evening storm had to do with it remain unresolved.

This is just one example of how reading the radar can lead to better birding. Try it for yourself this spring and see if you strike spring migrant gold!