Days of massive migration
It was gray and chilly at the hawk watch at Lighthouse Point Park in New Haven. The day before more than 700 hawks had poured across the sky there.
Not so this day.
“It’s slow,” said Bobbi Fisher, a volunteer who was keeping tabs on all the birds flying over. “But steady.”
In ones and twos, hawks flew over the open field at the park bordering New Haven harbor: kestrels, Cooper’s and sharp-shinned hawks, harriers and osprey.
There were also a couple of blue herons flying high overhead, a huge wheeling flock of migrating blue jays, and a constant, fluttering flow of monarch butterflies.
Down the coast, at the Quaker Ridge hawk watch at the Connecticut Audubon Center in Greenwich, there had been an equally big, shoulda-been-there day before group, with more than 6,000 hawks — predominately broad-winged hawks — soaring over.
“We saw groups of 900 hawks at a time,” said Ryan MacLean, who is the coordinator of the Quaker Ridge watch.
It is that time of year. The seasons are changing and all the birds are leaving. Or arriving.
Blue jays that spent the summer here move on, replaced by their identical cousins from the north. Warm-month double-crested cormorants are going. Coldmonth great cormorants are arriving.
And warblers that arrived in bright colors in May are now in olive drab and heading south.
“Most people don’t realize this,” said Patrick Comins, president of the Connecticut Audubon Society. “The fall migration is bigger than the spring migration, both in numbers and the variety of birds we see.”
Take for example, the state’s namesake, the Connecticut warbler. It’s never seen here in the spring.
But at a bird-netting session this month at Bent of the River Nature Center in Southbury — owned by Audubon Connecticut — the change of seasons changed that.
“We had two Connecticut warblers,” said Ken Elkins, director of education at Bent of the River.
Elkins said you can hear migrating songbirds as they’re passing.
“An hour before daybreak, the sky is full of sounds,” he said.
“It’s been hard with so much rain,” said Cathy Hagadorn, director of Connecticut Audubon Society’s Deer Pond Farm preserve in Sherman. “But we’re seeing the usual suspects.”
Comins said there are two or three shorebirds that birders see only in the fall in Connecticut — buff-breasted and Baird’s sandpipers, long-billed dowitchers.
Along with the resident golf-course grazing Canada geese, there are the beautiful Vs of migrating Canada geese coming down from, one would guess, Canada. Mixed in with them, now and then, are standouts — cackling geese, pink-footed geese, snow geese, Ross’s geese.
And there are hawks, by the tens of thousands.
There are about a halfdozen hawk watches in the state that feed their data into the Northeast Hawk Watch and the Hawk Migration Association of North America.
Collectively, they’re keeping records of this river of birds passing over.
Renee Baade of Newtown maintains a watch on Botsford Hill, on the RoxburyBridgewater line.
On the day the 6,000 birds flew over Greenwich, she counted about 800.
“It was perfect conditions,” she said.
Broad-winged hawks migrate inland, congregating in the southwest corner of the state — hence the huge numbers that can flock over Quaker Ridge in Greenwich.
Other species head down along the coastline. They’re the ones that people will see at Lighthouse Point in New Haven.
Steve Mayo, coordinator of the Lighthouse Point watch, said it’s the optimum place in New England to see hawks in migration. Birds coming down the coast will pause there before crossing New Haven harbor, then make the leap.
“Other places may get higher numbers, but in terms of variety of species, we’re the best,” he said.
Migrating shorebirds fly over Lighthouse Point as well. Blue jays and cedar waxwings gather in big flocks there. Fall warblers stop in the woods that surround the hawk watch field.
“That’s the nice thing about here,” Mayo said. “Even if you’re not counting, you can see good birds.”
And peregrinating birders — some real experts — stop in as well. When a single shorebird flies across the gray skies, they can nail the ID — a greater yellowlegs.
“I think of this place as a wonderful seminar on birding,” Fisher said.
Baade, of Newtown, said she’s always trying to get people to look up and see this world of birds in the fall sky.
“Until I point it out, they never know what’s over their head,” she said. “Never.”