The daily northwest winds of fall have been blowing through our August skies for two weeks now. On these winds come migrating birds from the forests of Canada, reaching our woods long before summer is over. Many of our tropical nesting birds have left us, spurred south by the cool, clear nights when they can see the stars.
Some of these migrants from Canada do not breed here, but only pass through in May and September, on their way to and from their more northern breeding grounds. A short walk in the thickets and forest edge behind the house gave me a close look at one of these, a Philadelphia vireo.
It emerged from the deeper but nearby woods when aroused by the pssssh noise I made. Birds are most attracted to this noise in late summer and fall, when the instinct to protect young birds is still strong. The vireo emerged from the deeper forest and foraged in the open along with several warblers.
Other such migrating species that have already been found in our region are a Wilson’s warbler, an olive-sided flycatcher, and two yellow-bellied flycatchers at different places on different days. These are some of the earliest autumn migration dates ever for such uncommon migrants.
Another group of birds that migrates from the north through our region in late August are the shorebirds. They will pause their southward rush only if they see some mudflats along our broad rivers or around receding reservoirs. The water levels were low here during early August, but the monsoon rain of Aug. 9 covered every muddy edge.
The rivers still ran too full when I visited on Aug. 15, but a few days later I got a call from a friend, Tom Gagnon. He was on his way to lead a butterfly walk in the Longmeadow Flats and Fannie Stebbins Wildlife Refuge, but stopped to search for waders and shorebirds first.
In West Springfield, he found five species of wading birds; green-heron, great blue heron, great egret, snowy egret, and black-crowned night-heron. At a spot on the Westfield River behind the Eastern States Exposition grounds, he found a muddy sandbar only just exposed by the falling water level.
Here were a group of shorebirds criss-crossing the sandbar on the far side. Two species were local residents, the killdeer and the spotted sandpiper, but others were migrants from farther north. These were least sandpipers, a solitary sandpiper and a Baird’s sandpiper.
I had not seen a Baird’s sandpiper in several years, so I dashed to this place soon after receiving Gagnon’s call. I found several least sandpipers in a small pool shaded by the overhanging trees at the edge of the river. With them was the Baird’s sandpiper, slightly larger, with longer wings that extended beyond the tail, and black rather than yellow legs.
At 6-inches long, the least sandpipers is our smallest shorebird, and the most common away from the coastline. In summer, flocks of up to fifty fly low over the Connecticut River, pausing briefly to rest or forage on sandbars.
The Baird’s sandpiper is one of our rarest shorebirds, either inland or at the coast. Its normal migration route is over the Great Plains, except for a few inexperienced young birds that wander east after leaving the Arctic islands of Canada and the Alaskan plains, where they are hatched.
Their migration takes them to and from the grasslands of Argentina and Paraguay, a trip of about 3,700 miles. They do not tarry much along the way, covering this enormous distance in about five weeks. It is hard to imagine how a 7-inch bird, poking at a puddle in a river sandbar in West Springfield, might manage such a feat, even on long wings.
While I watched this little brown bird, a series of enormously loud and grating croaks gave me a start. It came from downstream a short way, and was quickly followed by two gargantuan white herons flying toward me. They circled before me and silently headed down the river.
These graceful sailing creatures were great egrets, another coastal species that visits us in late summer, tasting the banquet of fish our rivers afford. Who can say summer birding has no excitement?
Seth Kellogg can be contacted at email@example.com
The Allen Bird Club website can be found at massbird.org/allen