Nice couple of days

There has been a nice influx of birds over the last two days. A front that stalled and dissipated before reaching the Florida peninsula  still encouraged birds to head south, and rainy local conditions forced many of them to land at Cape Florida. Ovenbirds continue to be the top species, with Worm-eating warbler in second place. This is typical for mid September, and the diversity is ramping up as we approach the end of the month. Today we banded three new species for the season: Common yellowthroat, Magnolia warbler and Cape May warbler.

Empidonax flycatchers are also coming through the site right now. We have banded several Acadian flycatchers as well as some Traill’s flycatchers. Traill’s is really two species, the Willow and Alder flycatchers but they cannot generally be separated without hearing their calls. We suspect we mainly band Alders here, but there likely is the occasional Willow mixed in. Sometimes we will hear Empids calling but there is no way to know if the one we catch is the same one we heard calling before, unless we actually see it fly into the net.

Left: Traill’s flycatcher; right: Acadian flycatcher. Acadian is much greener on the back.

Here is the lovely Cape May warbler banded today. These birds like to stay in the tops of the trees so we get excited when one comes down into the nets. Red-eyed vireos were also very abundant today up in the canopy, only occasionally drawing attention to themselves when they whined at squirrels.

Total captures:

46 new 2 recaptures of 10 species on Sept 16

43 new 9 recaptures of 15 species on Sept 17

Young female Magnolia warbler.

New banded; Sept 16/Sept 17 :

Ovenbird- 17/14

Black-throated blue warbler- 9/1

Northern waterthrush- 4/5

Worm-eating warbler- 4/3

Black-and-white warbler- 6/1

Red-eyed vireo- 2/5

Swainson’s warbler- 1/3

American redstart- 1/2

Blue-gray gnatcatcher- 1/1

Traill’s flycatcher- 1/1

Acadian flycatcher- 0/2

Magnolia warbler- 0/2

Prairie warbler- 0/1

Common yellowthroat- 0/1

Cape May warbler- 0/1

The high number of recaptures today is evidence of birds waiting at the site for clear weather to continue their migration. It is always interesting how the numbers of species caught can change so much from day to day.