Fall Bird Migration - It's On

Well Florida is having a very nice migration and winter bird wave the past few weeks, as many birds are stopping in to feed before their final push to South America and the Caribbean...while others are starting to arrive in Florida as their final winter destination. Despite still being stupid-hot and humid, the birds usually start coming down in September each year and this year has been pretty good, even with the slight delay in migrants due to Hurricane Irma.

The following birds are all migrants or winter birds over the past few weekends, shot with the A6300 and FE100-400mm lens, both with and without 1.4x TC, around Green Cay Wetlands in Delray Beach, FL...to give an idea of the diversity, most of these were shot in the same 200-foot stretch of trees and over the course of just a few hours each Saturday:

Great-crested flycatcher:


Prairie warbler:


Ovenbird:


Common yellowthroat:


Yellow-throated warbler:


Black-throated blue warbler:


Black and white warbler:


Acadian flycatcher:


American redstart (juvenile):


Red-eyed vireo:


White-eyed vireo (this guy was missing his tailfeathers, but doing OK):


Blue-grey gnatcatcher:


Northern parula:


Not the greatest shot, but I've only seen this bird twice in 9 years and they're exceedingly hard to find out in the open - this is the worm-eating warbler:


And this would be called a terrible shot - but this was a bird I've only spotted ONCE before, and is a very rare sighting for this area - this is the blackburnian warbler:


Cape May warbler:


There were even more that I didn't get a photo of - magnolia warblers, blue-headed vireos, northern waterthrushes, summer tanagers...it's been chock-full lately!

 

We really only get this many during the small fall and spring migration windows. Of course, we have a ton of species in Florida year-round and even more for winter, but many of these little passerines are stopping off to feed before launching out across the Caribbean for parts south - so we won't see some of these again until Spring. The big worry is whether some of these birds may die - quite a few species inhabit the central and eastern Caribbean for the winter, and will be taking a long tiring trip out to those islands only to arrive and find some of them nearly treeless, probably with very little bug larvae to feed on - from all the hurricane damage, bird sanctuaries like Dominica, Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, etc are in terrible shape...some birds may not be able to make it to another island or the return trip in spring.