The summer migrations of birds
Sparrows flock in fall. Juncos arrive in winter, winged blackbirds in spring
My simple mind makes simple categorizations. I know the birds and seasons overlap, but I like to keep things straight. My house and yard may be messy but when the phoebes start nesting in my woodshed overhang, I know winter’s gone for the year.
My summer birds are bobolinks, Baltimore orioles and catbirds. Even though bobolinks start showing up in June at Litchfield’s Topsmead State Forest, I think of them as in place and perching on grass stalks in July. Orioles used to build their hanging nests in the oak tree near the house where I grew up. Catbirds scat and nest where I live now.
For Angela Dimmitt, president of the Western Connecticut Bird Club, now’s the time birds wake you up at quarter to five in the morning with the dawn chorus — the mix of birdsong with everyone piping in as the sun rises.
“I am particularly thrilled to hear a wood thrush this year,” she said. (These fluting woodland birds are in serious decline in the state, so hearing one is getting rarer.)
Dimmitt said she also has two pairs of house
wrens in her yard. Both are hatching out a second brood of eggs, and both males are busy singing to mark territories.
Cathy Hagadorn, executive director of the Deer Pond Farm nature center in Sherman, owned by the Connecticut Audubon Society, said this is the time of year for aerial acrobats — swallows, chimney swifts, purple martins.
These birds are insectivores — insect eaters. They spend their days now soaring and looping across the sky, eating bugs on the wing.
They are social birds, living in close quarters.
“We have a growing colony of purple martins here,” she said.
Like Dimmitt, she’s hearing things.
“Even the chipping sparrows are so loud now,” she said.
There are late nesters — goldfinches and cedar waxwings. They time things so that their babies are born later in the summer. That way, there’s a seed crop to feed fledgling goldfinches, fruit and berries to fatten young waxwings.
Here’s the rub. The first signs of fall migration are starting.
Patrick Comins, executive director of Connecticut Audubon Society, said some shorebirds are already heading south. There is also a scattering of songbirds, now passing through from the north.
“Eastern kingbirds are starting to move,” Comins said. “So are some of the warblers.”
For Connecticut’s bird migration is never a spring/fall thing. There’s always some birds abiding their own interior clocks and taking wing.
“No matter what the
time of the year, there’s always something moving around,” Comins said.
It’s time to take stock on what birds are here, what aren’t. The North American Breeding Bird Survey — which began in 1966 — used a corps of trained volunteers working along assigned routes in June to determine bird populations in the U.S., Canada and northern Mexico.
Ryan MacLean, bird education specialist at the Greenwich Audubon Center — owned by Audubon Connecticut — said the center has participated in the survey for over 50 years, counting breeding birds in the GreenwichStamford area, as well as parts of Westchester County in New York.
What it found this year, MacLean said, is how a combination of over-development, environmental imbalances, and climate change is altering the bird population in southwestern Connecticut.
For example, the blackand-white warbler nests in forests with a thick understory. A variety of things — including too many white-tailed deer overgrazing that understory — is making that habitat disappear in the Greenwich area, and the birds with it.
“As short a time ago as 1990, we had 155 pairs of breeding black-and-white warblers,” MacLean said. “This year, we had zero pairs.”
The same thing is happening with ovenbirds — beautiful olive-green warblers that also need a dense understory for nesting, MacLean said.
“They’re moving to the north,” he said.
I’m lucky to have Topsmead State Forest nearby. The staff there manages its meadows to encourage bobolink nesting by not cutting hay until late in the summer. In other places in the state, MacLean said, such grassland habitat is hard to come by, as old fields either grow back to forests or sprout houses.
This is one of the lessons of summer. It’s fleeting. Gather ye bobolinks while you may.
“Get a pair of good binoculars,” said Hagadorn of Deer Pond Farm. “They’ll last you a lifetime. Look up high. Go out and see the birds.”