Light surface winds combined with moderate northwesterly winds at 3000 feet made for some good mid-August migration conditions across the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. Here’s the radar from 6:00pm last night through 6:00am this morning.
Frames are every 1/2 hour. Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized animation.
The radar was ablaze with migration last night, from the Central Flyway all the way to the East Coast. As far as I can tell, this marked the first major nocturnal flight of the season. As the winds were northwesterly above 500 feet, most birds were moving along a NW->SE trajectory. This should result in a nice influx of new birds into New Jersey, both from central New York, as well as from the east including Long Island. Expect concentrations along the coastal hotspots, including Liberty State Park, Sandy Hook, and Cape May. Otherwise, interior locations should have new birds present, but concentrations are expected to be low given the wide distribution of migrants across the landscape.
Please make sure to stop back and let us know what you’re seeing in the field!
Good Birding
David
One response to “A big early-August flight over the Eastern US”
so I’ll be the first to ground-truth for fall 2009…
I got out late (not until noon), but despite low expectations Duke wasn’t bad. I worked the hedges in the grasslands for a few hours and turned up a few migrants..
large numbers of icterids…big flocks of bobolinks that were almost certainly migrants, the breeders all left weeks ago. Birds in all stages of breeding plumage, pretty neat. Lots of orioles- pretty much all first fall Baltimores, but a few adults and a couple female Orchards mixed in. Lots of red-winged blackbirds
decent numbers of savannah sparrows..probably a mix of migrants and residents.
3 or 4 gnatcatchers
1 empid spp.
1 very dull warbling vireo (migrant or resident..not sure)