Right now one of the most amazing natural phenomena on the planet is happening right over our heads, and most people don’t even know it.
This time of year, millions of birds are migrating. They are almost certainly flying over your house. The smallest songbirds, even hummingbirds, fly thousands of miles from their winter homes to their summer breeding grounds. They fly over cities and open oceans, nonstop, hour after hour, but you don’t see them, because they do it all at night. Tonight, May 6, 2023, Birdcast.info (a project run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology) predicts that 460 million birds will fly over the continental United States.
On a moonlit night with heavy migration activity you can sometimes see them passing silently overhead, but their epic journeys are mostly invisible to us, and were a source of great mystery for hundreds of years. You can spot them during the daytime, though, as they frantically refuel, often doubling their body weight in just a day or two. Watch the trees and feeders for unusual visitors. Between May 1st and May 14th last year I recorded 128 species without leaving Louisville metro.
Songbird migration has been a little later than usual this year for reasons known only to the birds. Just this weekend it is finally picking up. I found fifty-two species at Cherokee Park this morning. I expect more tomorrow with southerly winds in the forecast, but today’s efforts resulted in a very special experience - a photo I thought I might never get, this eastern whip-poor-will that we were very lucky to spot in its classic pose, resting longways on a branch. My last encounter was three years ago when I was able to record one calling in our neighborhood. Excited just to hear one, I wrote in a previous blog post about my “somewhat irrational” goal of photographing one!
Whip-poor-wills are strictly nocturnal, exquisitely camouflaged, and not very common in this area. Getting a photo of one in daylight is almost entirely a matter of luck, but today we got lucky!
Eastern Whip-poor-will (Antrostomus vociferus)