EPIC!!!!!

56,636 warblers





Species

Ruby-throated Hummingbird 25 Northern Flicker 1 Eastern Wood-Pewee 1 Empidonax sp. 2 Eastern Kingbird 16 Philadelphia Vireo 3 Red-eyed Vireo 38 Veery 6 European Starling 246 Cedar Waxwing 5 Ovenbird 3 Worm-eating Warbler 2 Northern Waterthrush 45 Black-and-white Warbler 505 Prothonotary Warbler 1 Tennessee Warbler 7 Nashville Warbler 13 Connecticut Warbler 2 Common Yellowthroat 19 American Redstart 8,724 Hooded Warbler 1 Cape May Warbler 8 Northern Parula 479 Magnolia Warbler 18 Bay-breasted Warbler 4 Blackburnian Warbler 2 Yellow Warbler 38 Chestnut-sided Warbler 73 Blackpoll Warbler 20 "Baypoll" warbler 2 Black-throated Blue Warbler 87 Palm Warbler 158 Yellow-rumped Warbler 1 Black-throated Green Warbler 53 Canada Warbler 1 Wilson's Warbler 5 warbler sp. 46,365 Scarlet Tanager 2 Rose-breasted Grosbeak 8 Blue Grosbeak 1 Bobolink 62 Baltimore Oriole 36 Total warblers 56.636 Total 57,088 estimated American Redstart 40,729 estimated Black-and-white Warbler 4,346 estimated Northern Parula 2,544

Oh yeah, we missed some Ovenbirds, and other stuff too, but what can you do?!

photo by: Nick Knotonicolas

The Star (t) of the Day!!!

photo by: Nick Knotonicolas

Did anyone see a Hooded Warbler today? Nick shot one!

photo by: Nick Knotonicolas





I don't often throw this word around, but today wasWe are still trying to fathom what took place just after sunrise today. It was unbelievable.I am done with predictions folks; the mysteries of migration need to be unveiled by its perception in the now. The standard advice will still hold: check the forecasts; eye up the radar; ground-truth that stuff in the field, 24-7. But sometimes, you just can't know it all, or foresee its magnitude.I positioned myself in a 20 mph WNW-W wind and set-up my Morning Flight gizmos at 25 minutes till dawn. Tom Reed showed up soon after and looked giddy, but still not much sign of the pending Warbler-Geddon was in the air. The pre-sunrise 15 minute counting segment gave us 39 birds-- signs of Warblerpocalypse (aka Monday morning warbler-blitz) that was about to ensue! Sun-up to 10 minutes into the day, and 1,779 things, barely identified, already hopelessly under-counted, shot through their and our collective chaos.'We need help here, and we need to get a handle on the upcoming situation'. Mike Lanzone and David La Puma showed up in the course of this time. Mike asked me if I got the Connecticut Warbler that shot out in front of them down on the road. I stared him down for 5 seconds and slowly shook my head, missing probably 50 warblers in that moment.With La Puma at the helm of the Specteo software and Tom, Mike, and I armed with two clickers each, we set out to make sense of the rest of that first hour. Clearly, the flight was "kick-'started" by American Redstart, the most abundant of the neotropical warblers in all years of the count. We clicked our clickers furiously for 40-50 minutes, counting by tens, to try and keep up with what we could ID as redstarts and what just got lost in the wash-- the catch-all warbler sp. category. The trees were spawning birds at an incredible rate. Many troops in the Higbee fields had mouths agape for that hour and helped corroborate our estimates of the overall flight composition.To realize later on, that this day's identified American Redstart total was well-beyond every past YEAR total was just to much too handle. Add to that what we actually estimate as the percentage composition of the total flight 40,729 or 71% redstart, at an absolute, conservative minimum, and we are going over the moon. This historic flight was 'Started indeed.And the flight started just as quickly as it ended. This flight was 90% over already, 40 minutes after dawn. It was like burning embers in a forest fire. I can come up with no other conceivable explanation except that a huge hit of birds settled into the Higbee dunes and/or perhaps were stuck south in the mouth of the Delaware Bay sometime before dawn, and just flew and fought for their lives. With continental declines across the boards in our warbler numbers, it is heartening to see such a capacity left. Though I question if new weather patterns are driving this mechanism toward more deadly fallout potentials. Prepare to be enriched by future CMBO posts about the situation on the radar over the course of that night and the data that we humbly collected.