As a major frontal boundary marches west across the country, birds took to the sky over the Northeastern US 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.

You can just begin to see the low pressure system, associated with the next cold front, as it peeks into view early this morning (the end of the animated loop). With it, of course, also came some strong southwesterly winds (mostly above 1000 feet elevation). You can see from the regional composite especially, and to a lesser extent from the individual radars, that as the low arrived this morning, migration quickly subsided. While not a “fallout”, per se, this will likely have implications for the birding conditions today.

For most of the night birds were migrating on NW winds, which would favor coastal locations for concentrations of birds. This also means that the region as a whole experienced an influx of new birds, since the “source pool” (NY State, and Pennsylvania, mostly) also showed heavy migration heading this way. Because migration appeared truncated early this morning, I would not expect many birds to have continued migrating into the morning hours… so they had to land somewhere! Cape May is a good bet, Sandy Hook is too, and inland migrant traps should be checked. Unfortunately I wouldn’t expect much at the hawkwatches this morning, since winds are out of the south already.

As always, we love to know what you saw out there, so please stop back and let us know.

Good Birding

David