The winds over Pittsburgh were favorable last night and the birds were anxious to head north. There was high migration over southwestern PA and BirdCast tells the tale on their new Migration Dashboard.
Since 2017 we’ve been checking BirdCast for live migration maps and forecasts. This year they’ve supplemented the maps with a Migration Dashboard that provides a wealth of county-by-county information including expected species each night.
As of 5:00am today, more than a million and a half birds had flown over Pittsburgh but they were slowing down. Live traffic was sparser (50,700 birds in flight), they were moving more slowly (12 mph), and they were losing altitude (1,400 feet). This is normal; they will land before dawn.
The count of birds peaked at midnight (graph on left). It was a really good night for April (graph at right.)
You can see an additional reason why the numbers dropped at 5:00am by comparing these two Live Migration maps. At 1:40am the map in Pittsburgh is bright yellow with migrants but a dark hole (no activity) develops in Ohio and West Virginia at 5:00am. Birds stopped flying there because it was raining ahead of a cold front.
screenshots of BirdCast Live maps on 17 April 2024, 1:40am and 5:00am
Who migrated over Pittsburgh last night? The Dashboard shows 14 expected species. (This is a screenshot. Visit Allegheny County’s Dashboard and scroll down to see the rest of the list).
Yellow-bellied sapsucker, Schenley Park, 14 April 2024 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
15 April 2024
Twelve of us gathered in yesterday’s perfect weather for an outing in Schenley Park.
Schenley Park outing, 14 April 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
When I announced the outing, I said we had a good chance of seeing yellow-bellied sapsuckers and indeed we did — at least four plus an interesting interaction between a male and female.
Was this pair migrating together? Birds of the World says Not likely. Male yellow-bellied sapsuckers migrate first, the females follow later. When the males reach the breeding grounds they drum and squeal to establish territory and attract a mate. There was no drumming and squealing in Schenley (they don’t breed here) but the two birds followed each other from tree to tree. One of them seemed annoyed. Was the other “stealing” sap from his/her holes?
There were plenty of holes to choose from. The sapsuckers redrilled old rings on shagbark hickories and made new rings on tuliptrees.
Yellow-bellied sapsucker sipping sap from a tuliptree, Schenley Park, 14 April 2024 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
We also saw nest building among blue jays (a pair) and red-winged blackbirds (just the female) …
Blue jay carrying nesting material, Schenley Park, 14 April 2024 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
… and a pair of red-tailed hawks incubating eggs in last year’s successful nest under the bridge.
Red-tailed hawk on nest under PH Bridge, Schenley Park, 14 April 2024 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
There aren’t many wildflowers in Schenley Park because of abundant hungry deer but we saw a few foamflowers (Tiarella sp) in an inaccessible spot.
Foamflower in bloom, Schenley Park, 14 April 2024 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
Can you see the flying honeybees and honeycombs in this photo? The hive is so high up (20-30 feet) that we wouldn’t have seen it if we hadn’t been looking for birds.
Honeybee hive way up high in a hollow branch, Schenley Park, 14 April 2024 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
In all, we saw 33 species and lots of breeding behavior. Our last sighting was a surprise: two bald eagles, an adult and an immature, circling northward in Junction Hollow. I wondered if one of the Hays eagles was escorting an immature intruder away from the Hays nest.
Fox sparrow singing at Frick Park, 12 March 2024 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
16 March 2024
Four days this week were unseasonably warm with highs 18 to 20+ degrees above normal. The flowers and birds responded.
On Tuesday, Charity Kheshgi and I heard a fox sparrow at Frick Park but he was elusive. We spent a long time trying to get a good look him until a blue jay’s weird call made us pause. So did the fox sparrow, as shown above in Charity’s photo.
On Wednesday there were few birds at Toms Run Nature Reserve but we saw purple dead nettle (Lamium purpureum) in bloom.
Purple dead nettle, Toms Run, 13 March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
On Thursday 14 March I was surprised at the lack of birds at Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, but the flowers on the Jennings Trail cliff face (bordering the creek) were responding to the heat. It’s not Full Blown Spring yet but I found:
Harbinger of Spring, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 14 March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)Spring beauty, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 14 March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)Sharp-lobed hepatica, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 14 March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)Round-lobed hepatica, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 14 March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)Virginia bluebell budding flower, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 14 March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)Alder catkins, Raccoon Creek Wildflower Reserve, 14 March 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
And in case you missed it Carla, the female peregrine at Pitt, laid her first egg at the Cathedral of Learning on 14 March. Additional eggs are expected approximately 48 hours apart.
Amur falcons (Falco amurensis) breed in Siberia and northern China and travel 22,000 km (13,670 mi) each fall to southern Africa. Not only is their migration the longest of all the raptors but when they stopover in autumn to refuel in Nagaland, India their flock can number half a million birds. Right now they’re in southern Africa where I hope to see them.
Amur falcons are insectivores who, on migration, capture flying insects to eat in mid air.
Amur falcons are present from October to December near the Nagaland village of Pangti where they fatten up on termites before continuing their journey. There are hundreds of thousands of falcons in the air at once.
Their abundance led to near tragedy, however. Until the practice ended in 2012, Nagaland hunters caught tens of thousands of falcons per day in fishing nets hung from the trees. Each year they killed 250,000 Amur falcons to sell as meat for mere pennies. They thought the falcons would never disappear.
The killing ended abruptly when journalist Bano Haralu returned to her homeland, witnessed the destruction, and got a hunting ban placed in November 2012. More importantly, she and her colleagues taught the villagers, and especially the children, the importance of the falcons and a way forward through ecotourism. It was a stunning turnaround and a credit to the people of Nagaland.
Here are the largest number of birds I have EVER seen in my life! Estimated to be 500,000 Amur falcons migrating to Africa, stopping midway at Nagaland. Happy to see them after the work @wti_org_india did years ago to protect them with community & FD #Nagaland#IndiAvespic.twitter.com/3URyj8Ueq0
UPDATE on 29 January 2024: I was fortunate to see a female Amur falcon in Namibia today, swooping for insects near the Chobe River. (These photos are from Wikimedia.)
Watching gulls at the Point, Pittsburgh, PA, 31 Jan 2015 (photo by Tim Vechter)
11 January 2024
Only a few days ago I was lamenting that we weren’t having a snowy winter, neither snow nor snowy owls. Well, be careful what you ask for! A few days of bitter cold are coming to Pittsburgh next week. If Lake Erie freezes, arctic gulls will fly south to find open water on the rivers. The photo above shows some cold and happy birders looking at rare gulls at the Point in January 2015.
So what are the chances this will happen next week?
As of this morning, the forecasted low temperature for dawn on Wednesday 17 January is 9°F. This map for next Monday sure looks like we’re in a “polar vortex.” Cold, right?
But will it be cold long enough to freeze Lake Erie and send the gulls south? Probably not. The eastern Great Lakes ice map as of yesterday, 10 Jan 2024, shows nearly 100% open water (white).
There’s not even a hint of ice (blue) on most of Lake Erie and the Great Lakes ice-to-date graph for winter 2023-24 indicates that ice is at a near record low. There’s a lot of cooling off to do before the lakes will freeze.
So next week I’ll have to wear my Minnesota gear to go outdoors but it’s unlikely there will be any unusual birds out there. Will I want to go out in 9°F anyway? I’ll have to wait and see.
Early this week a big flock of American robins came to my neighborhood, ate all the fruit they could find, and left.
On Monday morning, 18 December, they were frantically eating this pyracantha fruit outside my window. At one point I counted 45 but they were moving so fast I think there were more.
Pyracantha full of fruit, 23 Nov 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
The birds were frantic because they knew bad weather was coming. In mid afternoon it snowed.
Snow flurries 18 December 2023, 3pm (photo by Kate St. John)
The next morning the fruit was gone and so were the robins.
Sam pyracantha with no more fruit, 19 December 2023 (photo by Kate St. John)
American robins are still in Pittsburgh but they’re feasting in other locations. When the fruit is gone and the ground is frozen, the robins will leave.
p.s. Today’s title reminds me of the 2006 bestselling book on punctuation by Lynne Truss called Eats, Shoots and Leaves. The comma in her book title is really important. Did the panda eat, shoot a gun, and then leave? Or did the panda eat two things — shoots and leaves? … In the case of today’s blog title: Robins don’t eat leaves. They eat fruit and leave the neighborhood.
Most people who find discarded bird tracking technology don’t know what they’re looking at and even when they do they don’t usually repurpose it. But every once in a while a transmitter goes roaming.
White storks (Ciconia ciconia) that breed in Poland migrate to eastern and southern Africa for the winter. For some, their final destination is the Blue Nile River valley, circled in yellow on the map below.
That autumn she flew to the Blue Nile River valley in Sudan where she became mysteriously inactive. Eventually she stopped moving altogether and had either died or the transmitter fell off. Researchers couldn’t figure out what happened until they got the phone bill.
Questions were raised when Kajtka lingered in the area for more than eight weeks, only roaming around 25 km [15 miles] in various directions.
In 2018, the mystery was solved when EcoLogic Group received a phone bill for 10,000 Polish zloty, the equivalent of £2,064 [$2,500]. Someone had picked up the tracker in Sudan and taken the opportunity to make 20 hours of phone calls using the SIM card.
Fortunately for cash-starved bird research this sort of episode is rare.
If Kajtka had survived she would have joined her fellow white storks moving north in March, perhaps with a stopover in the Hula Valley shown below. Gorgeous!
This month a flock of 100 to 200 common grackles has been hanging out at Frick Park, chattering in the trees and swirling in a dense flock whenever they’re disturbed. This is typical fall behavior for grackles and blackbirds but I wondered why they picked the park.
According to Birds of the World, common grackles (Quiscalus quiscula) are not very territorial during the breeding season and drop all rivalry in fall and winter. On migration and at overwintering sites they prefer to roost and feed in huge flocks, sometimes mixed with other blackbirds and some robins.
Common grackles roost near plentiful food but they don’t require wild places. Urban roosts are often favored on tree-lined streets or in parks. Their fall roosts in New Jersey can contain 3,000-500,000 birds (of which grackles comprise 33%).
This flock at Patuxent in Maryland looks to be 100% grackles.
The huge grackle flocks probably won’t stay in southwestern PA for the winter. By December they are further south, as shown on the eBird Dec-Feb map below.
Birds like the European pied flycatcher (Ficedula hypoleuca) that winter in the tropics and southern hemisphere do not use weather clues to tell them when to fly north in the spring. Instead they cue on changing day length and return at the same time every year. But as Earth’s climate changes, spring comes weeks earlier than it used to and their migration timing is out of sync. Scientists in the Netherlands decided to give a few lucky birds a lift (a Lyft?) to Sweden and it made all the difference.
Pied flycatchers prefer to nest in or near oak trees where their nesting season is timed to correspond with the peak of caterpillar season. Unfortunately, spring is two weeks earlier now in the Netherlands, pied flycatchers arrive too late and have locally experienced a 90% decline.
The old timing of Netherlands’ spring is now found in southern Sweden so scientists at University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Sweden’s Lund University decided to see what would happen to migration and nesting success if a few pied flycatchers were transported (by car!) from the Netherlands to suitable habitat in Sweden.
Anthropocene Magazine reports, “For three springs, starting in 2017, scientists from the University of Groningen in the Netherlands and Sweden’s Lund University caught newly-arrived Dutch female pied flycatchers and drove them by car to a nesting spot 570 kilometers (354 miles) away in southern Sweden that was already home to other pied flycatchers.”
The experiment was wonderfully successful. The Netherlands’ females were in sync with the food supply and were twice as prolific as their Swedish counterparts who were locally out of sync. After spending the winter in Africa the former-Netherlands females returned to Sweden and so did their offspring!
Later the research team proved that migration timing is genetically inherited in European pied flycatchers by taxiing a few eggs laid in the Netherlands to Swedish nests. Those offspring returned to Sweden the following spring on the Netherlands timing.
Taxi service cannot be the answer to out of sync migration but birds are adapting on their own. During the study, banding still continued at Netherlands nests and some of those youngsters were found nesting in Germany, halfway to Sweden. They flew there on their own.
The blackpoll’s transoceanic path was proven in a 2015 study by Bill DeLuca and the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. VCE writes:
Bill DeLuca (Northeast Climate Science Center) and VCE solved this great modern-day avian mystery. Using light-level geolocators attached to Blackpoll Warblers in Vermont and Nova Scotia, DeLuca and colleagues documented the longest distance non-stop overwater flights ever recorded for a migratory songbird. During October, Blackpoll Warblers initiate a ~3-day non-stop transoceanic flight of ~2500 km from the north Atlantic Coast to Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Radar data show migrating songbirds fly at 2,600 to 20,000 feet while making this journey. After a few weeks, they fly onto Columbia or Venezuela where they overwinter. Their spring migration route takes them over Cuba to Florida, where they journey up the eastern US seaboard to reach their breeding grounds in late May.
Of course I wondered if blackpoll warblers sleep in flight during their 3 day transoceanic trip, but we won’t find out any time soon. Blackpolls are way too small to wear the sleep monitoring gear used on the great frigatebird.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons, maps from eBird Weekly Abundance; click on the captions to see the originals)
