2018 Spring Migration Comes to a Close

This morning, I still arose at 5:30 am. I quickly showered and dressed. The windows were open to help the house cool off, it's still a bit early for air conditioning. And the yard was fairly silently. Spring migration has come to a close. After 2 + weeks full of birds and regular rain storms at night (and often during the day), the boom time for birding in my backyard came to end.

This spring's weather was lousy. I consider the height of migration to be mid-April through mid-May and I am particularly vigilant about watching for birds and topping off feeders. The mid and late April snows followed by almost constant rain in early May certain impacted the birds' migration. We saw a ridiculous numbers of birds some mornings and they made quite the commotion.

The yard was frequented by Orioles both Orchard and Baltimore, both pictured above. The highest count at one time was 8 male Baltimores and 4 Orchards. I had a very difficult time keeping oranges and grape jelly at the feeders. They arrived on May 1st and as of today, I only saw two this morning and none this evening.

Warblers like the Yellow Rumped Warbler pictured above also came calling in numbers like we hadn't seen before. Common Yellow Throats, Black Throated Greens, Tennessee, and even this Chestnut Side Warbler (pictured below) all made debut appearances in our yard.

Thrushes have often been visitors to the yard during migration, we usually pick up a Gray Catbird or a Brown Thrasher, or a Swainson's Thrush. This year we had them all, and a new visitor, a Gray Cheeked Thrush (1st image below). The Thrushes made regular visits to our shrubs (Highbush Cranberry, Staghorn Sumac, Pagodoa Dogwood) from which they'd launch hopping assaults on our backyard compost. For a couple of days we had two Gray Catbirds who were also making trips to our Oriole feeders (2nd picture below, in shrub, not the feeder) and we had two Swainson's Thrushes in the dogwoods just yesterday (3rd picture below)

Our previous record count for bird species in a single year was in 2015 with 47 species identified. For 2018, we are at 55 species and we still have the rest of summer and fall migration to go.

We also started spring with nesting pairs of birds using our nest boxes as of mid April. Chickadees in one, and Eastern Bluebirds in the other. May has changed this situation entirely. The House Wren evicted the Black Capped Chickadees and some mystery has happened to the Bluebirds. The male hasn't been seen in 2 or so days, the female has been around. They had a single egg in the nest which was intact yesterday but as of today was broken. It remains unclear what happened, but it is possible that this will be the first time in four years that Eastern Bluebirds fail to nest successfully in our yard.