Wow- what a crazy busy weekend! Radar outages, getting into scouting for next weekend’s World Series of Birding, Mother’s Day… my head is spinning!  Here are the regional composites for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights.

Frames are every 1/2 hour. Click on the thumbnail to view the full-sized animation.

As you can see from the composites, that last cold front came through like gangbusters: too far to our west, resulting in poor migration conditions on Thursday night; just to our west and strong southwest flow causing heavy migration on Friday night; then gone by Saturday morning, and replaced by strong northwest winds that shut down migration on Saturday night. Tonight, Sunday night, we’re still looking at strong northwest winds across the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast, which would suggest that we won’t see a nocturnal flight.  This has proven quite good for Garret Mountain which has experienced two great days of migrants sticking around after the large flight on Friday night. If you can get there tomorrow, you’ll probably have a great day. Around Cape May, the northwest winds have proven effective once more, producing multiple Swallow-tailed Kites, 8+ Cattle Egrets, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher, and oodles of swallows, including numerous Cliff.

Right now it looks like the next migration-causing conditions will occur on Tuesday night, as the next cold front marches toward the east by mid-week. Possibly more interesting, though, is the chance of a second front reaching the east coast by the weekend. If it does, we could have a significant flight into the region for the Big Day on Saturday… I’ll be keeping an eye on it (as I’m sure all of the teams will) and will be posting regular updates as the weather becomes more predictable. For now, though, it’s looking good. Tomorrow morning I’ll resume regular postings, and hope that the radar cooperates!

Good Birding

David