Onward to Argentina

--or at least Sinking Valley--

At 3 AM back on July 26th, a Bobolink flew over. Since I’ve started the night recordings, I have recorded Bobolinks regularly in spring migration, even though, in 53 years, we’ve never seen one stop here in the daytime. Bobolinks are a polygynous grassland species that nests sparsely around here but are more common farther north, from Maine and the Maritime provinces westward across the continent. This is our first fall record. An early migrant, the Bobolink heads south to hang out with many others of its species in Southern fields, then after a couple months, goes on. And on.

Bobolinks gather by the millions in the llanos of Venezuela, and then cross the equator to spend the Southern Hemisphere summer in northern Argentina. A single Bobolink thus may travel 12,000 miles per year.

Quiddyquit

On Tuesday night, August 8th, an even more extraordinary transequatorial migrant passed over First Field. This is one I’ve been anticipating for a couple years, another northern grassland nester that heads for Argentina in July and August. Its entry in Birds of the World begins with a quote from Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac:

On cool August nights you can hear their whistled signals as they set wing for the pampas, to prove again the age-old unity of the Americas. Hemisphere solidarity is new among statesmen, but not among the feathered navies of the sky.

Certainly, Tuesday night’s dry high was the perfect excuse for an Upland Sandpiper flyover. The 5-note ‘quiddyquit’ flight call is not very distinctive; it belies the extraordinary capabilities of this species. Unlike the Bobolink, which takes a leisurely course and makes several lengthy several stopovers, the Upland Sandpiper can reach its ‘wintering’ summer grounds in the Argentinian pampas within a week of leaving its breeding territory, and thus spends most of its life ‘down there.’

A more prosaic transequatorial nomad is the Barn Swallow, the world’s most cosmopolitan species, and one of its best loved. This week, Tyrone’s Barn Swallow numbers have increased from a pair or two into the dozens, and a group of a few families is hanging out on the balcony wires. On Wednesday afternoon, four youngsters were content to sit and wait while their parents swooped in with prey for them every few minutes. With myriad bugs in the sky right now, there is no shortage of food.

The mystery of Barn Swallows is that these could be locals, or from hundreds of miles away, and they could end up wintering just about anywhere south of the US. Perhaps they will join one of the migrant clouds of millions that are occasionally seen funneling through Central America, and end up spending the non-breeding seasons in the Amazon, or make it all the way to Patagonia. What I do know is that we’ve only got a couple more weeks to enjoy them here; we’ve never recorded a Barn Swallow in the hotspot after August.

Meanwhile, it has been weeks since I have seen other swallows in Tyrone. Perhaps they’ve simply moved to more buggy local places, but I suppose our Northern Rough-winged Swallows are hundreds of miles south by now, finishing their molts and waiting for propitious Gulf Coast cold fronts to cross over to the Yucatan.

Canadians on the Move

In the Yazoo Delta where I lived for over a decade, Canada Geese are called ‘Canadians’ to distinguish them from the Snows, Ross’s, and ‘specklebellies’ (Greater White-fronted Geese). You may remember that a motley group of non-breeding molt-migrants spent a bit of time around Tyrone a few months ago, and then my sightings dwindled as the local couples hatched, fledged, and protected their broods until the young were ready to fly. As predicted, right at the end of July, the first agglomerations of what I took to be the locals starting going over at dawn and dusk.

On Monday evening close to 9 PM, two large flocks totaling around 145 geese came from the east and through the Gap, heading to roost, I can only assume, in the Tyrone reservoirs west of town. I expected to see them again on Tuesday morning, but only 16 passed over at 6:27 AM. On Thursday morning, in the rain, 104 came west over town.

Are these the local, non-migratory birds comprising the totality of this year’s successful families, or do they include out-of-towners as well? It’s months before the great southward migration, but as we saw with the molt-migrants, Canadians move in other directions ‘out of season’ in search of food. Many birds do this after breeding, of course—it’s just that geese, like Turkey Vultures, are much more conspicuous when they show up suddenly in large flocks.

Bye Bye Black Bird

While all this has been going on, European Starlings, Common Grackles, Brown-headed Cowbirds, and Red-winged Blackbirds have made a quiet exodus from the Tyrone area and the hotspot, or at least the part I can see from the balcony. For all I know, vast mixed clouds of them swirl over Sinking Valley scant miles from here. But from where I sit, the most I detect is three grackles a day, and two or three starlings. On the evening of July 31st, I saw around 400 starlings flying north, and it could be that they took almost all the locals with them in search of greener pastures. They’ll be back, of course.