Strong southwest winds on Monday and Tuesday nights prompted high alerts from Birdcast for intense nocturnal bird migration in eastern Massachusetts.
Sure enough, we experienced many newly arriving birds into our area on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings. These are the days that birders go to their favorite “hotspots”, i.e. Plum Island, to view the higher numbers and varieties of birds that these flights produce.
Those of us who feed birds in our yard will often see a “new” bird at the feeders, or a new visitor in our trees, shrubs, or birdbaths. For us in Essex, we heard our first oriole singing in the back yard on Tuesday and saw several yellow-rumped, black-throated blue and Northern parula warblers in our trees.
Wednesday morning, we had our first hummingbird and a few more warblers came through the yard. A handsome male rose-breasted grosbeak dined at our tray of striped and black-oil sunflower for the first time this season. I was quite sure that I heard a scarlet tanager singing in our back woods that morning as well.
By Thursday, we had at least three orioles at our jelly feeders, including two males and a female. Two male ruby-throated hummingbirds drank from two separated feeders in the yard.
House wrens were back in many yards throughout the area, evidenced by their loud, bubbly song. They soon will be searching out their favorite houses in which to nest. The male wrens will fill several houses with sticks and wait for the females to comer along to choose their favorite!
These days of high migration brought in the first, albeit early wave of warblers to Plum Island.
Yellow-rumped warblers were everywhere along with good numbers of palm and black and white warblers.
The first black-throated green and black-throated blue warblers, along with yellow, prairie, blue-winged, magnolia, Nashville, chestnut-sided and Blackburnian warblers were all being seen.
In addition to the warblers were numbers of blue-headed vireos – we counted up to 10 on the Hellcat boardwalk alone. A couple of white-eyed vireos were also reported. Both Baltimore and orchard orioles were feeding on the trees in bloom on the Island.
Very exciting for early morning birders has been a pair of clapper rails calling to each other near the boat ramp across from Lot 1. These large rails have nested in previous years, more easily heard than seen, as they move through the marshes mostly undetected.
Hawk watchers have had a number of good days on the island. Southwest winds are less productive, but each time a front comes through to shift winds from the northwest, it is more favorable for hawks to move. There have been days with high counts of kestrels, as well good numbers of merlins and harriers moving past their Lot 1 platform site.
Greater and lesser yellowlegs are now coming through in larger numbers and the first willets have been arriving this past week. Dunlin, pectoral sandpipers, and a few least sandpipers have stopped on their way north, but shorebird migration will peak later in May.
Killdeer have been present for a few weeks now and the pair that usually choose the maintenance area to raise their young have already laid an egg there. The area is now cordoned off so please do give them their space as they have enough natural predators to contend with.
So May is now upon us and we look forward to many more birds arriving on southerly winds. If you are interested in checking the migration progress on any given evening, you can go to Birdcast.info.
There you can see a color-coded map where the highest number of birds are moving via radar. It will even estimate hoe many birds are moving. When the colors light up in eastern Massachusetts, that’s prime time to be looking for newly arriving birds the next morning!
Steve Grinley is the owner of Bird Watcher’s Supply and Gift in the Port Plaza, Newburyport. Email him at Birdwsg@comcast.net. On the web: www.birdwatcherssupplyandgifts.com.