Hawks, kingbirds and good days again

After a slow week we are finally starting to catch some birds again! Yesterday we banded our first raptor of the season, a hatching-year female Cooper’s hawk. We don’t catch very many hawks these days as the trees in the hammock have grown over the years and the canopy has closed in. Cooper’s hawks, however, and their smaller relative the Sharp-shinned hawk specialize in hunting birds and other animals in wooded habitats. Most other species stay above the trees, and we saw quite a few Merlins zipping overhead today whenever we were looking at a patch of sky. The Florida Keys Hawkwatch is tallying these birds as they stream overhead on their way south.

This is the National Weather Service radar for the southeastern US around 1015pm the night of Oct 6. The severe rain event over the Carolinas has finally broken up and millions of birds are rising up in the dark to continue their migration south. The green blobs are dense concentrations of migrant birds, and they haven’t quite made it to the Florida peninsula yet. The lighter blues to the SW of FL near the Keys are birds that likely left the northern Gulf coast the night before and have been flying all day; these possibly will land and rest in Cuba.

This is the radar the next morning, around 430am on Oct 7. After a good night’s flight thousands (millions?) of birds have made it as far south as Tampa and Melbourne. A few leaders are reaching the Miami area, as the blue colors show. Birds have a distinct look on radar; compare the diffuse blobs of blue and green overland to some lingering convection offshore of Melbourne. The convection has sharper edges and usually contains yellow, orange and red colors.

This was the radar from last night, Oct 7, around 930pm. The huge pulse of migrants has reached south Florida. I went outside last night and this morning and heard flight calls from dozens of Veery and Swainson’s thrushes passing over. These strong fliers were on the leading edge of this wave of migrants, followed by assorted warblers and millions of Common yellowthroats. Gray catbirds are further upstream according to reports from other banders and observers to the north of us; we will probably have many around by the weekend. The advantage of a slowdown (besides giving banders a chance to clean their house) is you can track a distinct movement of birds down the coast once they get going again, and get a sense of how long it takes aggregates of birds of various species to make their way south.

We banded a first for the station yesterday; this Eastern kingbird was in the same net as a Gray kingbird. Given how aggressive these flycatchers are, one probably chased the other into the net. This was a great opportunity to compare these two species. The Eastern kingbird is an overall darker blackish-backed bird with white tipping on its tail. The Gray kingbird, a Caribbean and Florida specialty, is a larger bird with a distinct mask and a  plain tail that looks squared-off when spread but is notched when folded. In both sets of photos the Eastern kingbird is on the left and the Gray kingbird is on the right.

Here are our totals for the last two days. If there had been rain overnight near Cape Florida today would have been a record-breaker. The weather was quite nice so the thrushes kept going while some of the warblers dropped in.

TOTALS: 7 Oct/8 Oct

Overall: 43/87

1. American redstart: 13/16
2. Common yellowthroat: 3/26
3. Ovenbird: 3/14
4. Black-throated blue warbler: 9/7
5. Northern parula: 4/7
6. Worm-eating warbler: 1/3
7. Western palm warbler: 3/0
8. Black & white warbler:  0/3
9. Painted bunting: 1/2
10. Northern waterthrush: 1/1
11. White-eyed vireo: 0/2
12. Swainson’s thrush: 0/2
13. Cooper’s hawk: 1/0
14. Eastern kingbird: 1/0
15. Gray kingbird: 1/0
16. Cape May warbler: 1/0
17. Prairie warbler: 1/0
18. Green heron: 0/1
19. Red-bellied woodpecker: 0/1
20. Blue-gray gnatcatcher: 0/1
21. Swainson’s warbler: 0/1