There’s a frontal line parked across the Delmarva tonight, with intense migration occurring south of it all the way down to Florida, and west to Texas and up through the Ohio River Valley. There’s a big push out of Cuba as well, beginning to reach the Florida Keys as I type this email. The big question will be whether the birds pushing out of Virginia and the Carolinas will push their way through the frontal boundary and hit the north winds (albeit light ones) over our area. My guess is they won’t make it very far, but the ones that do push through will hit Cape May in the morning and be looking for Chris Vogel’s backyard for an early breakfast and place to crash. Unfortunately the radar feed that I usually download to make my morning posts has crashed over the weekend, and will not be fixed until tomorrow, so I can’t post the radar again until Tuesday morning. All the individual radar feeds at the ncar site are down as well, although for some reason the national composite is working. Here it is, for 12:30am tonight.
I look forward to hearing the birding results for South Jersey tomorrow morning.
2 responses to “Migration forecast”
Nope- it doesn’t look like birds made it through the frontal boundary, which makes me think there was a fallout somewhere around the Delmarva, given the amount of activity on the Norfolk VA radar last night (and all points south of there). Unfortunately, I don’t see any evidence of such a fallout, as none of the lists from those states are reporting exceptionally good days today (at least thus far). There were reports of “new birds (FOS)” for each state, indicating that some new stuff moved in, but not the big “downing” of birds I would have expected with the migration and storms obvious last night…interesting. A sighting of note, though, was a Swallow-tailed Kite in Virginia…maybe one will make it up this way!
I was in Belleplain State Forest on Monday morning. I had new birds for the year such as Ovenbird and Black and white Warbler, but these birds were here from over the weekend at least. Nothing new had arrived this morning (Sunday night) as far as my friends and I could determine. Guess that frontal boundary did keep them south of it. I always wonder though because they did start moving that night. But stopped when hit the frontal boundary. If later in May, would they keep going? Maybe some. Hey, send that Swallow-tailed Kite over my house someone!