CAPE MAY IS SYNONYMOUS WITH VISIBLE MIGRATION
IN NORTH AMERICA and it did not disappoint on my recent visit to attend the 67th
Autumn Birding Festival there. I feel very lucky this autumn with the timing of
my visits to migration hotspots and just like Spurn Point the previous week,
conditions for visible migration were again very good. First of all a fast
moving cold front in late autumn tells insect-eating birds it is time to move south and
associated strong northwesterly winds at night push migratory birds to the
coast and ultimately down New Jersey’s Cape May Peninsula. As they run out of
land at the tip of the peninsula they put down. At first light these birds
start to re-orientate by flying back north along the landward side of the
peninsula, on the shore of Delaware Bay. It was Richard
Crossley and Paul Holt who ‘discovered’ in the 1980s that this movement could be seen
from the dyke at Higbee Beach, where they break cover from the wood lots and
cross the Cape May canal, which effectively makes the point an island. There
was a great bunch of friends gathered here for what turned out to be the
biggest day of the autumn so far with somewhere between 15,000-20,000
Yellow-rumped Warblers alone making the ‘morning flight’ north across the
canal. The sky was literally covered with birds for the first couple of hours
of light. ‘The counter’ Sam picked out Blackpoll and Tennessee Warblers by call
and a few others included Black-throated Blue and Northern Parula. Both
kinglets were also well represented and the bushes were alive with sparrows,
mostly Chipping and White-throated, however, the other most obvious species
were Northern Flickers and Sharp-shinned Hawks as well as Rusty Blackbird, with
around 50 seen amongst the flocks of red-wingeds passing over. I have never
seen anything close to the scale of this movement of passerines in such a short
period of time and after a while I stopped using binoculars and just stood and stared at the jaw-dropping spectacle. In the distance, continuous lines of Black Scoters were moving
south in Delaware Bay, several Northern Harriers passed by and a
‘Common-Loon-in-the-moon’ caused some laughter.
