These past few days at the Farm should have been rich with migrating birds. But, instead, it’s been a grind, a lot of work for little result. Over the past 5 days we’ve banded just 47 birds, averaging barely 9 per day. These 47 push this year’s Spring total to 305. Unless there’s an increase – a dramatic increase – over the last 2 weeks we won’t come even close to reaching our 5-year average of 571 birds. We’re clearly in line to have the worst Spring result since we started at the Farm. In the middle of May we’ve been used to seeing warblers flitting through the tree tops. This just hasn’t happened. Oh well….it is what it is and there’s not a hell of a lot we can do about it. As one of my favourite bumper stickers says: “Mother Nature bats last.” And she’s sure stonewalled this year’s efforts.
But let’s quit crying. A lot of good things have happened in these 5 days: great muffins, wonderful repartee, long-needed carpentry (at long last the banding counter has been put up!).
Despite the low numbers we had some good moments:
Rick
Ok what does this mean? That the miserable weather has slowed their migration, so they’re going to come later? Or because of the miserable weather, when there was good conditions, they simply didn’t forage at the farm, but continued their Journey to make haste because they were already delayed and had nesting sites further north they needed to get to?