As the year unfolds bringing a tidal wave of incoming migrant birds and filling up the cast of summer birdlife, it becomes harder to single out any one species as best of the day. This morning I left home early while there was still a touch of frost. I thought I’d check a favourite marsh to see if I could find Sora or Virginia Rail. The marsh is large and it’s bisected by a fairly busy road, so while it’s easy to scan the marsh for bird life, road noise can be really annoying. This morning road noise was nothing compared to the clamour of Canada Geese but despite them I heard Sora, Virginia Rail and American Bittern quite distinctly . Any of those three would be a bird of the day, but somehow it would have been better to catch a glimpse of at least one of them. Swamp Sparrows, Wood Ducks, Mallards and Red-winged Blackbirds completed the marshland cacophony.
Later I visited another favourite site, a mixture of marsh, dry upland fields and cedar swamp. As I locked the car the first bird I heard was a Yellow Warbler, singing its signature “Sweet sweet sweet shredded wheat” , not a rarity by any standard, more of a ‘They’re-back’ bird, like the Red-winged Blackbirds of March. In a week or so they’ll be commonplace, but today’s was my first Yellow Warbler of the year and so welcome that it was my Bird of the Day; despite the earlier formidable competition.
The surge of late April and early May spring migrants landing on the shores of North America is massive; so massive that the flocks are detected quite clearly on radar. Take a look at this site any time after dark in late April of early May, scroll to the area of South Texas, Louisiana, and central eastern USA, and you’ll often see large blue donut-shaped masses; usually they’re migrating birds. Erratically shaped multi-coloured masses are usually storm systems. Here’s a sample from this evening