Return of the son of the revenge of more Fall migration photos

Winter Wren working it for the camera

The thing about Fall migration is that it lasts a long time. Spring migration is a few intense weeks in May, with a slow build up for maybe a month. before, and a rather abrupt ending. Fall migration starts around the end of July and continues in a fairly steady stream for about three months.

So the less common birds get spread out a bit. Sort of.

lazy afternoon

This Whipoorwill turned up in the Loch in northern Central Park in late September. That's a nice bird for Manhattan; we get maybe one a year--more frequent than then Chuck-Will's-Widow, less frequent than Common Nighthawk.

Whipoorwills sleep most of the day, like owls, and wake up around dusk to hunt insects. They're hard to spot, since they don't move around much during daylight, and they generally roost pretty high up. This one was in an unusually low perch, the the photographers had a great time with him.

That same day, a Grasshopper Sparrow was spotted on the Knoll, also in the northern part of the Park just a short walk from the Whipoorwill's roost. I didn't see that bird, though. Well, maybe I did: I saw a very streaky backed sparrow fly by me that the other birders said was the Grasshopper. They had had a good look at it before, but for me, that wasn't enough of a view to count.

showing the flag

Then the next week, two fairly uncommon birds showed up at Harlem Meer. This female Green-Winged Teal spent a lot of time browsing a patch of duckweed in the southwest corner of the Meer near the little island.

The Green-Winged Teal is our smallest duck. Here's what that means:

size comparison

You see it's about half the size of the Mallard. You can almost ID it just on size.

Also on the Meer at the same time was a female American Wigeon. I had a heck of a time picking it out of the crowd of Gadwalls, even though they were all just a few feet off shore. It blended in surprisingly well.

semi-anonymous

The dark bill isn't all that striking when you're watching it swim around, and the coloring is a bit cryptic. Eventually I noticed that it was the only one never showing a white speculum, and then it became obvious.

bird of the evening

Besides the Grasshopper sparrow, Central Park has hosted a couple of other uncommon sparrows. A Vesper Sparrow spent the better part of a week in the area called Locust Grove, along a woodchip path just west of the Great Lawn between the Delacorte Theater and the Pinetum. It only liked to come out when the light was dim.

Of course, a lot of non-rarities continue to move through, like the Winter Wren at the top of this post, and this very confiding Pine Warbler:

warbler at my feet

He hopped around within a few feet of me, too busy foraging to worry about some slow monkey.

But there are signs the migration is ending, like the arrival of Juncos. They usually come right at the end.

sign of the end times

Breaking News!

There's been a lot of stuff happening. Here's a quick rundown:

Fall migration has begun

first warbler of the Fall

I had my first warbler of the Fall migration season on Wednesday, A Yellow Warbler calling constantly and foraging in the trees beside the dock at Turtle Pond.

Also at Turtle Pond, a pair Kingbirds had nested above the dock, but I haven't seen any signs of fledglings, and today Junko Suzuki notices that they seemed to gathering more nesting material. I saw that as well, after she pointed it out. Do Kingbirds ever re-nest if they've had a nesting failure, or start a second brood after fledging the first? I've read that they only ever have one brood.

Tern festival!

TERN FESTIVAL

Elena and I went to Governor's Island on Sunday for the Audubon Tern Festival. It was too hot for us to do any of the bird walks, but we did have a nice look at the colony on Yankee Pier.

OMG baby terns

The fledgling terns are coming along nicely. Terns will re-nest if there's a problem with their first batch of eggs, so the baby terns range from these fuzzy globular chicks to well-plumaged adolescents.

Man, are they all noisy.

Governors Island Yellow-Crowned Night Heron update

we're a happy family

The Yellow-Crowned Night Heron nest on Governors Island has not just one, not two, not three, but four baby birds in it (you can see three in that photo). It was a 90-degree day, and the parents and nestlings were visibly panting. I had the impression that the adults were mostly standing there to shade the young ones.

They're about three weeks old (Ben Cacace first saw a nestling on July 2, and it was not more than a couple of days old at that point). They are supposed to take 30 to 42 days to leave the nest, so we're looking at the very end of July or the first week or two of August for the fledging.

There's also a second nest on the island--I don't know where, exactly--but the reports sound like the same male might be responsible for both. I have not heard about any nestlings there.

There's a very nice YouTube video of the nest, by Cathy (who is quoteny on YouTube and @Cathyewe on twitter).

Also on Governors Island, we saw a large number of Brown Cowbirds, none of them adult males; many seemed to be juveniles to my eyes. Anyone know what's up with that?

Fall migration

It's tough being a Cardinal papa.

The Fall migration proceeded apace this weekend. I had 32 species in Central Park on Saturday, including eight warblers (Bay-breasted Warbler, Northern Waterthrush, Black-and-White Warbler, Common Yellowthroat, Redstart, Northern Parula, Magnolia Warbler, and Chestnut-sided Warbler) and some other migrants, such as several Brown Thrashers and a couple of Rose-Breasted Grosbeaks.

Chestnut-Sided Warbler juvenile

Sunday was a bit slower, only 25 species, but one was a Yellow-Throated Vireo, my first of the year (and 177th species in the county).

There are still resident birds finishing up their breeding seasons, as well, like the Cardinal at the top of this post. I spotted a juvenile Cardinal begging food in the big willow at the Upper Lobe; papa came to feed him, then spotted me and decided I needed a good looking-at. He looked pretty worn out.

Raptor migration is under way. Someone showed me a nice photo of a juvenile Bald Eagle who had flown over the Ramble, and a lot of hawks have been seen. I'm told it's going to be a good week for Broad-Winged Hawks passing through--I hope I can get out somewhere I can see some.

Sunday morning, I spotted a bunch of Gadwalls on Turtle Pond. It took me a while to be sure what I was seeing, since they seemed to be in various stages of molt.

Gadwall on Turtle Pond

This weekend's edition of "things I've never seen before" was a red-Tailed Hawk attacking a Black-Crowned Night Heron. I saw the heron fly into a tree near Hernshead on the west side of Central Park Lake. Some 15 seconds later, the hawk flew in and made what looked to me like a pretty serious pass at the heron, who dropped out of the tree and flew low across the lake making a sound I cannot find words to describe. The ducks on the lake were quite startled.  The hawk moved north, but came back to fly around the lake a few minutes later.

I don't know what that was all about. A heron is insanely large to be prey for a Red-Tailed Hawk. Maybe it was some kind of personal grudge.

Fall migration begins

We're baaaaack!

It's mid-July, and the first warblers are returning to Central Park. There were reports this week of Black-and-White, Northern Parula, and Common Yellowthroat in the Ramble; on Saturday I came upon a Louisiana Waterthrush on the Gill, just upstream of Laupot Bridge.

It's also the start of shorebird season. On Tuesday afternoon (July 15) James Knox found an American Avocet on a dock in the Hudson just south of Dyckman Street, "loafing with the gulls" in the words of one of the several lucky observers who saw it afterwards. It was gone the next day.

There've been a couple of reports of a Yellow-Crowned Night Heron in the saltmarsh at Little Hell Gate on Randall's Island. I didn't see it when I was there on Thursday--just a juvenile Spotted Sandpiper at the marsh on the north shore. Both the southwest shore and the northeast ball fields were full of Barn Swallows, so I have no complaints about the trip.