I’m not a big believer in weather prognosticators – except, maybe, Wiarton Willy – so when I began to hear rumblings about serious inclement weather today I took it with a grain of salt. But when field work diehards like Keira and Michelle started contacting me and cancelling out I paid a little more attention. As almost anyone knows, an 80% chance of rain means a 20% chance of no rain and therefore worth taking a chance or, at least, a wait and see. But a 100% chance over 10 or 12 hours may just be messy. So with a weather map in front of me and peer pressure behind I decided I would take the day off and sleep in. And so I did! I didn’t even set the alarm and slept right through to 4:41….what a treat! And, as I write this, it IS raining – moderately but steadily almost guaranteeing that mosquitoes will be a factor on my next visit to the Farm. But that’s in the future. Right now I have the chance to look over the numbers for this season and compare them to previous years. It’s a sad tale.
We’re way below our 5-year average of 571 birds banded in the Spring with just 344…and time is running out. But not just time, migrants too. In the past two banding days (21st and 22nd) we didn’t see any of what I would consider “birds on the move”; all were simply birds that have reached their nesting grounds and are here for the Summer. There are still migrants on the move but the vast majority have gone through.
This is our 6th Spring here at the Farm and it’s becoming clear that this site, while interesting, is not a place to reliably see Spring migrants in any numbers or certainly with any consistency. Their presence here is at the whim of the weather. If conditions are conducive to migrating they will usually over-fly and keep going until they cross Lake Ontario. If conditions are poor they are unlikely to move. Most Spring days when we get half decent numbers it’s due to already enroute migrants running into bad weather resulting in a “fall-out”. And what we end up catching is very much whimsical; e.g., in 2024 (our best Spring with 742 banded) we caught 129 Myrtle Warblers. This Spring we’ve banded only 1 and seen very few besides. That is something that is hard to explain.
Still….it is what it is. You take the good years with the not so good. And I firmly believe that a bad day banding beats a good day of anything else.
It’s interesting to me that the conversion of the 7-acre soybean field to tall grass prairie, with its rich crop of seeds, has made the Farm a Fall/southbound migration destination for a large number of birds. We rarely saw Bobolinks in the Fall but have banded over 160 in the past two. Consider Song and Swamp Sparrows: pre-meadow (2021-2022) we banded 88 Swamp Sparrows (avg. 44/year) and 98 Song Sparrows (avg 49/year). In the 3 years of prairie grass we banded 1,138 Swamp Sparrows (avg. 379/year) and 1,445 Song Sparrows (avg. 482). These dramatic changes are directly due to the conversion to prairie grasses and make the Farm the place to be for seed-eating birds during the southward migration regardless of the weather.
But the Spring….is hit and miss. In the past 4 days at the Farm we’ve banded just 39 birds:
1 European Starling
5 Gray Catbirds
1 Cedar Waxwing
3 American Goldfinches
2 Lincoln’s Sparrows
3 Swamp Sparrows
1 Baltimore Oriole
3 Red-winged blackbirds
1 Brown-headed Cowbird
2 Common Grackles
1 Northern Waterthrush
1 Nashville Warbler
12 Northern Yellow Warblers
3 Common Yellowthroats
Miscellaneous photos:
I was at Fern Hill School recently: the Burlington campus on Tuesday and Oakville on Wednesday. They had a few interesting birds:
Rick