Last week was a great week in birding for me. I added several birds to my life list and was able to mentally articulate a couple birding hot tips, so let’s get into it.
Life list-
Blue-Headed Vireo. No pic, and it’s not particularly rare, but one of those birds I just haven’t paid enough attention to to properly identify.
Northern Rough-winged Swallow- as above, not rare, but I have never paid enough attention to swallows.
Cliff Swallow- this was a real get, a rare bird. There were several mixed in with a large mixed flock. Again no pic, but a solid ID from close up.
Notable: I saw six white pelicans soaring overhead, and a large raft of divers on our local reservoir including some bufflehead. I don’t know why, but bufflehead cheer my heart, maybe because so many would hang out around my house in Michigan in spring and fall.
Here’s the birding Hot Tip and it’s a twofer-
Any time a big cold front blows through with high winds and blue skies get your butt outside anywhere you can- there will be raptors flying everywhere. Get yourself out there any time the wind is abnormally high. Vultures will be soaring, red-tailed hawks will be swooping, and bald eagles will make cameos in strange places. Thursday afternoon post-front I saw dozens of turkey and black vultures, saw a pair of bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, and an osprey, with some bonus white pelicans thrown in. The next morning I went out early and did not see any raptors while birding. Winds over 25 miles an hour gets the big birds up and moving and makes for some fun birding.
The next tip is related- any time post-front get yourself down to water, especially during migration. My birding location last week was the local Commerce reservoir, a 325 acre impoundment. Really high winds force migrating waterfowl to put down wherever they can, sometimes pushing them off course and making them seek shelter on bodies of water they normally wouldn’t use including farm ponds. I counted well over 100 divers rafted up far out on the lake. I was only able to positively identify bufflehead and ring-necked ducks. I feel like I left some species on the table, and my next big purchase will likely be a spotting scope.
Bonus Hot Tip: this is a phenomenon I have seen before, but Thursday it really clicked in my mind as it pertains to birding. It’s a little detailed, but the concept is simple.
Get to the downwind side of a lake after a cold front, or any time aquatic insects hatch, especially in spring or early summer. Why?
I’ll just explain the setup. The way Commerce Reservoir lays out, the wind was blowing hard across the lake to the dam. As happens in spring, large midges were hatching out of the lake. The winds had forced a mixed flock of several hundred swallows down, and they congregated at the dam where the high winds were pushing all those midges. The swallows used the power lines over the dam as roosting and resting spots, and the wind funneled midges up and over the dam into the mouths of the swarming birds. This led to my sighting a couple lifers including the rare cliff swallow.
Get to the windward side of a lake any time insects are hatching and you will see concentrations of everything from swallows to gulls, terns, flycatchers and even cedar waxwings. Any bird that eats flying insects will congregate there. If there’s a dam funneling windblown insects, so much the better.
So there’s my observations and tips from last week. I’ll leave you with a gallery of bird pics from Friday morning.
Do you have a related hot tip? Leave it in the comments, I’d love to hear it.
Gallery note- a lot of these are cropped in hard for uploading to eBird with my checklists.
