Maggie's Farm

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Tuesday, September 21. 2021

Autumn bird migration


Unlike the Spring songbird migration, which comes in giant waves, Fall migration is scattered and gradual. I've seen a few fall warblers in recent days (difficult to identify because they are so drab), and our Catbirds have departed.


As in Spring, small birds (Passerines and the like) migrate at night.


For birders, the cool thing in Fall are the hawk, eagle, and, to some extent, owl migrations. They are daytime migrants. Our breeding Ospreys left last week, headed mostly for the Caribbean.


Actually, not sure about how owls move south but they do not do extensive migrations. 

Posted by Bird Dog in Natural History and Conservation at 13:20 | Comments (3) | Trackbacks (0)

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Just in the last few days we've had a huge uptick in hummingbirds visiting our feeders As in going from 1 or 2 at a time to 10 or 12 at a time. I'm pretty sure they are migrators on their way south. (I'm in central Texas and on a major flyway.) Very entertaining to watch.
#1 T Migratorious on 2021-09-22 07:01 (Reply)
Same here in my part of Texas - they're swarming the feeders prior to their migration. You could hang up 50 feeders for 25 hummingbirds and they'll still try to drive the competition off the feeders. The yard is full of their chattering birdsong from dawn to dusk.
#1.1 Aggie on 2021-09-22 09:31 (Reply)
Our hummingbird season here in Rockport (near Corpus Christi) got a slow start this year and really ramped up only two days ago. They went nuts yesterday and this morning, but I think they caught this incredibly welcome cool front to head south after breakfast today.

Hummingbirds and raptors are our exception to the spring-fall pattern. The songbirds mass in spring, falling out here to feed after crossing the Gulf on their way north. In September, the hummingbirds and raptors show up en masse. There are some hummingbirds in the spring, going north, but for some reason they're more spread out then. September is our Hummingbird Festival, a huge tourist draw.

Next month the Whooping Cranes arrive, to stay for the winter, or what passes for winter here. Fall arrived only this morning--fall meaning a brief drop in the humidity and 10-15 degrees knocked off the highs and lows all week. Dry air and temps between 65 and 85! We always say if the weather were like this all year, we'd be paying San Diego prices for real estate and couldn't afford to live here. But now that the beastly heat of summer has broken, the next six months are ice cream.
#2 Texan99 on 2021-09-22 13:09 (Reply)

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