Third northern parula, Frick Park, 14 Oct 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
17 October 2022
In just two days the mix of songbirds at Frick Park changed from warblers to thrushes and sparrows.
On Friday 14 October Charity Kheshgi and I found three northern parulas (Setophaga americana) along Nine Mile Run at Frick Park. eBird said they were worthy of a Rare Bird Alert. Fortunately Charity got photos of all three, shown in the slideshow below with three photos of each. Two of them are very easy to tell apart because they are at the extremes of bright vs. pale colors.
1. First northern parula, Frick Park, 14 Oct 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
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2. Second northern parula, Frick Park, 14 Oct 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
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3. Third northern parula, Frick Park, 14 Oct 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
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On Saturday night migration was intense which often means that all the birds leave Pittsburgh. Instead, on chilly Sunday morning we found a new mix of songbirds including those pictured below.
Gray-cheeked thrush, Frick Park, 16 Oct 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
There were many more American robins [50 instead of 7] and white-thoated sparrows (Zonotrichia albicollis) [36 instead of none] and we even heard a fox sparrow (Passerella iliaca) (example below). I wish we could have seen it.
Meanwhile we’re still waiting for dark-eyed juncos but not the snow that comes with them.
Songbirds are attracted to water — to streams, puddles, marshes, ponds — especially on migration.
Watch a soothing video of birds enjoying the water in Richard Hall’s backyard in Athens, Georgia.
I was shocked/thrilled at how many folks over the world enjoyed the #WarblerPartyPond video, so here’s another 90 seconds of heaven, highlighting the migrant and resident birds flocking to bathe in my small in-town yard this weekend. How many can you ID? Species list in comments. pic.twitter.com/AOeeSyWLak
Eastern North America has only one hummingbird, the ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris), but in late fall after the ruby-throats have left for the tropics a few western hummingbirds come east.
Rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) breed in the Pacific Northwest to Alaska and spend the winter along the Gulf Coast and in Mexico. Their range map says they don’t occur in the eastern U.S., not even on migration.
However, beginning in late October, a few show up in Pennsylvania. Some even reach the Atlantic Coast. An eBird map of rufous hummingbird reports from October to February, 2019-2022, shows them dotted across the eastern U.S.
As the September wave of migrating warblers disappears to our south the next wave of birds has arrived from the north, among them ruby-crowned kinglets (Corthylio calendula). These tiny dynamos resemble the plainest warblers and vireos but are so unique that it’s worth taking a closer look at them.
For starters, though ruby-crowns are called kinglets they are no longer in the same genus as golden-crowned kinglets (Regulus satrapa). In 2021, thanks to DNA and some very unique traits, the AOS placed them in a genus all their own: Corthylio.
Smaller than any warbler, ruby-crowned kinglets are olive-green with somewhat whitish bellies. Their most reliable trait is their constant wing-flicking, punctuated by rapid darting to and fro. They also have:
Two white wingbars,
Big white eyerings broken above and below,
A tiny beak
No neck
A proportionally larger head compared to the look of a warbler
Thin black legs with golden feet
A dry call note and a rousing song
Males have red or orange feathers hidden atop their heads which they raise when agitated.
On any particular bird you may never see a ruby crown. The females don’t have them and the males are not always agitated. However if you keep watching, a bird may come close to watch you, then raise his crown when he figures out who you are. Maybe this curious ruby-crown is female.
Ruby-crowned kinglet, golden slippers (photo by Steve Gosser)
Ruby-crowned kinglets are short-distance migrants that breed in spruce-fir forests in Canada and the northern/mountainous U.S. They spend the winter in southeastern Pennsylvania but are rare in western PA outside of migration. October is the time to see them in Pittsburgh.
There was much excitement in British birding this week when two yellow-rumped warblers (Setophaga coronata) and a first-ever least bittern (Ixobrychus exilis) were sighted in the Shetland Islands, the northern tip of Scotland.
Both species are found only in the Americas but all three birds crossed more than 2,200 miles of the North Atlantic non-stop, likely forced offshore from the Canadian Maritimes or Newfoundland to escape Hurricane Fiona, the strongest hurricane ever recorded in Canada.
The birds were found more than 10 days later in the Shetlands on 5-7 October. It is hard to imagine their ordeal. The yellow-rumped warblers seem fine but the least bittern was exhausted and underweight and was taken to rehab where it died overnight.
Catch the excitement of seeing birds far from home in these tweets from British birders.
Oh my God!!! I’ve found a MYRTLE WARBLER on #Shetland today. All those days of resisting chasing other people’s birds and trying to find my own really paid off today #Megapic.twitter.com/euPCYv9mme
I am impressed that the warblers gravitated to the only trees in the landscape. This is similar to warbler behavior at Magee Marsh in May when they are found in small patches of trees — the only trees among miles of marsh and farmland.
The least bittern was found hunched on the shore, not in good shape. It died that night in rehab.
9 October 2022. There’s more: A first-ever Empidonax flycatcher in Ireland and a Baltimore Oriole in Devon, UK. Unfortunately the Baltimore oriole was eaten by a sparrowhawk (an Accipiter).
Migrating chimney swifts roost for the night in local chimneys and wake up when the sky glows before dawn. This morning the sun had not yet cleared the horizon when the swifts flew out of Cathedral Mansions chimney and circled the chimney over and over again, testing the air. It was 41 degrees F.
Though the sky is clear this morning and the wind is from the north, the swifts (probably) decided there were not enough bugs flying so there would be nothing to eat on their way south. They would be cold and hungry if they left now but the bugs will come out as the day warms up. They decided to wait for that to happen.
So they all went back to bed. Here’s a photo of them pouring back into the chimney. (They are just dots in my cellphone photo.)
Chimney swifts re-enter Cathedral Mansions chimney to wait for the day to warm up, 3 Oct 2022, 7:22am (photo by Kate St. John)
(photos from Wikimedia Commons and by Kate St. John)
If you’re birding on the coast of Maine you already know this is a good year for winter finches, but I’d just arrived from Pittsburgh so I was surprised to hear jip-jip-jip among the conifers last Saturday in Acadia National Park. Was I hearing crossbills? Yes!
In eastern North America, there is a good food crop along the coastal areas of Maritime Provinces southward into New England, which should hold many finches this winter.
Spruce cones are everywhere at Acadia, littering the trails in various stages of ripeness from sappy to seedless.
Spruce cones at various stages, Flying Mountain, Acadia National Park, 25 Sept 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Small groups of red crossbills (Loxia curvirostra) are almost everywhere, too. If you know what to listen for the birds are easy to find on Mount Desert Island.
Lots of people are seeing and hearing them as shown in eBird’s September 2022 map below. Note that the high density of crossbill reports is actually due to the high density of birders in the park.
The “Northeastern Crossbill” (i.e. eastern Type 10) will be around this winter, but will they migrate down the coast to Long Island, Cape May and Delaware and points south, as they sometimes do as cone crops are depleted as we progress through the winter season.
Though Pittsburgh won’t see crossbills, check out the Winter Finch Forecast 2022-2023 for what we can look forward to in western Pennsylvania. If we’re lucky we may see:
Common and hoary redpolls
Purple finches
Evening grosbeaks, certainly in PA’s northern tier
Red-breasted nuthatches
And a big year for blue jays.
(photos from Kate St. John and Wikimedia Commons, map from eBird.org; click on the captions to see the originals)
Tonight’s BirdCast Migration Forecast shows there will be intense migration from Michigan down to Mississippi and Georgia. The flocks will fan out east and west, touching southwestern Pennsylvania.
If you go birding on Friday 23 September, expect to find warblers and thrushes still passing through and an increasing variety of sparrows. Watch for the skulkers – Connecticut and mourning warblers — in late September. Perhaps you’ll see the last of the flycatchers, some of which are already considered “rare” now in eBird.
Friday’s sun and northwest wing will also encourage broad-winged hawks to migrate during the day. Keep an eye to the sky or visit a hawk watch in your area. Hawk watch locations and data are listed at hawkcount.org.
If you’re awake one to two hours before dawn on a calm September night, put your ear to the sky and you may hear birds calling overhead in the dark.
Millions of birds migrate at night and call in flight to maintain contact with their fellow travelers. In the one-to-two hours before dawn they begin their descent and are easier to hear but it takes dedication or insomnia to be awake during those prime sleeping hours.
Fortunately with the advent of microphones, recording devices and sonogram technology, ornithologists and amateurs have recorded nocturnal flight calls (NFC) and can identify who’s calling as they fly by. The sonograms are like fingerprints for each species and can be compared at this quick reference website, NocturnalFlightCalls.com, announced this month by Tessa Rhinehart at the University of Pittsburgh’s @KitzesLab.
Many calls, especially those of warblers, are so high-pitched that they are outside my range of hearing so here are three examples of some easily audible nocturnal flight calls.
The Swainson’s thrush (Catharus ustulatus), above, has such a distinctive flight call that you can identify it in the dark by sound. All About Birds describes the call as a hollow peep that resembles the call of a spring peeper frog.
Make your own NFC recorder using a microphone, a dinner plate, a bucket and a computer. Instructions and information at Nemesis Bird’s Night Flight Call primer. (This article may be as old as 2012.)
Red-eyed vireo, held by bander Nick Liadis, 31 Aug 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
8 September 2022
Yesterday Charity Kheshgi and I visited Nick Liadis’ bird banding project — Birdlab — at Hays Woods, the City of Pittsburgh’s newest, most remote, and least developed park.
Nick runs Birdlab at three sites: Hays Woods plus at two private properties, Upper St. Clair and Twin Stupas in Butler County. During migration Nick is out banding six days a week unless it’s raining or windy.
Hays Woods is unique for its size and habitat so close to densely populated Downtown and Oakland. Like an oasis it’s an appealing stop for migratory birds. We were there to see Nick band five birds on a slow day compared to the day before when he banded 60!
Hays Woods, The Forest in the City (image courtesy Friends of Hays Woods)
Oakland is visible from the Hays Woods powerline cut.
Oakland in the distance, view from Hays Woods, 31 Aug 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Nick has placed the mist nets in a variety of habitats. They are intentionally hard to see. When birds see the nets they avoid them.
Bird banding mist net at Hays Woods, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Every 30 minutes the banders walk the nets to check for birds. Lisa Kaufman assists at Hays Woods on Wednesdays. Here she is walking the powerline cut.
Walking to check the nets, 31 Aug 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Each netted bird is gently placed in its own cloth bag and brought back to the banding table. Here Nick tells Lisa what time to record.
Nick Liadis and Lisa Kaufman, bird banding at Hays Woods, 7 Sept 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
It’s an ovenbird.
Ovenbird to be banded, held by Nick Liadis, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
To age the birds Nick checks their wings, tail and body feathers for molt stage. Below he points out the very faint fault bars on the tail feathers that indicate feather growth. If all the bars line up, then these tail feathers grew in at the same time, which means the bird is still wearing his very first tail feathers and thus hatched this year.
Examine the feathers for molt stage and age, ovenbird at Hays Woods, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Nick blows on the belly of a Nashville warbler to check the lump of fat that is fuel for migration. This Nashville warbler had a high fat score so he may be ready to leave tonight for his wintering grounds in Mexico.
Checking the fat score on a Nashville warbler, Hays Woods, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
Nashville warblers are one of the smallest birds but it’s not noticeable until they are in the hand. Nick prepares to apply the band.
Applying the band to a Nashville warbler, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Nick holds an ovenbird after banding.
Bander Nick Liadis holds an ovenbird, Hays Woods, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Each of us got to release a banded warbler.
Kate St. John holds an American restart before releasing it, Hays Woods, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)Charity Kheshgi holds an ovenbird before releasing it, Hays Woods, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
And we learned how much northern cardinals hate to be captured. Cardinals of all ages screech and bite! We were grateful not to hold one.
Female northern cardinal awaits her bands, Hays Woods, 7 Sep 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
To learn more about Nick’s banding project and schedule a visit, see his website at birdlab.org.
1. First northern parula, Frick Park, 14 Oct 2022 (photo by Charity Kheshgi)
