North winds continue to give migrants in the east problems, but the real interesting event last night is the line of storms that passed through Ohio last night. Ohio lit up with migrants early in the evening and migration seemed strong even while the storms were passing through in the early morning hours. These conditions of storms passing through during a time of strong migration have a good chance of causing birds to stop migrating as they advance through the storm. Pennsylvania is still suffering from the north winds but it appears that western PA still managed to get some good migration movement through the night. There rest of the state also experienced limited migration as birds continued to push through the slight north winds as evidenced by the State College velocity radar image above. This shows birds moving northeast despite winds from the north. And the good news for PA is we should be getting better winds tomorrow.
View the full night radar animation.
Like last night, the wind map and radar paint a nice picture of birds moving en masse when the winds are from the south or are light. Good migration conditions are slowly shifting east as evidenced by lower level of migration in the Central Flyway and increased movement across Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee.
In areas that experienced precipitation last night, check out your lakes and waterways for waterfowl put down by the storm. Conditions may have been good to produce a fallout of passerines along Lake Michigan as storms passed through overnight and put down birds that were already concentrated due to the lake. This is a region I am not very familiar with so if anyone has any feedback, or suggestions, please leave me some comments.
Look for an big influx of early migrants like Chipping Sparrows and Pine Warblers. Swallows, Blue-headed Vireos, Blue-gray Gnatcatchers and Yellow-throated Warblers and Louisiana Waterthrushes likely made a major push and should be occupying many of their traditional breeding areas soon.
Check out Alex’s post for an idea of birds to be expecting in the next 2 weeks.
For migration updates or other regions check-
Woodcreeper – David focuses on Wisconsin and New Jersey
Tom Auer – Tom’s blog covers New England
Birds Over Portland – Greg blogs about the Pacific Northwest
Badbirdz Reloaded – Angel & Mariel cover Florida and the southeast
Birding the Crane Creek – Kenn Kaufman’s predictions for NW Ohio
I need your help! These reports will only be as good as the feedback I get on these updates. Please leave comments on interesting patterns of migration you are seeing in the field so I can incorporate some ground truthing to my forecasts and predictions. Thanks!