Park Birding

My favorite part of migration is the way that anything can show up right in your backyard . Throughout the winter you have a pretty static bird population, and same with the summer, but the periods in between will vary from one day to the next. For example, on Tuesday this week I walked to work through Creek Park and found three Ash-throated Flycatchers (one below). On Thursday, when I walked the park again, I found none. However, the number of Western Tanagers had jumped from two to at least ten! Some of these birds (especially the Tanagers, it seems to me) will stick around a day or two to feed, but many migrating individuals feed through the day and catch the midnight train northward - as the Ash-throated Flycatchers apparently did. You can check out recent pictures of birds from right here in La Mirada parks here: http://flickr.com/photos/rowleypics/. I even have an album of pictures I've taken in La Mirada Creek Park (the park I go through to get to work every morning) here: http://flickr.com/photos/rowleypics/sets/72157604454374702/. All these birds could show up in any Southern California back yard (though a Dusky-capped Flycatcher probably won't).

http://flickr.com/photos/rowleypics/2437422159/

Ash-throated Flycatcher in Creek Park. This is right across Imperial from where the Dusky-capped Flycatcher spent the winter. The birds are very similar, but this picture shows that the Ash-throated Flycatcher's belly is very pale. Also, the tail shows stronger rufous on its central tail feathers and the rufous does not extend all the way to the tail's tip - there's a dark line that cuts it off. That's a typical Ash-throated feature. The Ash-throated Flycatchers never vocalized, very different from the noisy Dusky-capped, and they were much more cooperative - as you can tell by the picture quality!

You can actually observe the nocturnal migration of birds via radar on the internet! This is pretty cool, and complicated, but here's a simple and fairly reliable way to do it. It's also bandwith intensive - just FYI. I'm following recommendations I saw on the Texas Birding Forum (TEXBIRDS), but there are other websites out there, too, and some offer some different methods. Here's the link: http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/radar/. If you want to watch the nocturnal flight of birds, here's the easy way to do it: first: set the "product" to "regional reflectivity" (".5 degree reflectivity" works, too, but is more restricted in scope). That sets it so you'll be getting data from the correct altitudes. I just leave the "background" at default. Second: you need to set the time frame so that you're looking at night (since that's when birds migrate). The time zone is UTC. Right now it's 2:30 pm (1430) PDT and 2130 UTC (GMT) - so we're 7 hours behind out here. If I want to watch the night flight I can set it for the morning - 0600 PDT is 1500 their time and set the loop duration for 6 or 8 hours. There you go! Now, click on your area of the map. I aim for SOX in Southern California.

The blue color is mostly birds moving northward. The reason that it's not uniform is mainly due to the fact that the radar will find birds best at certain distances away according to the birds' elevation and the radar's effectiveness at different angles. Other factors, like humidity and such, also contribute to the reliability, but in general them be birds.

Another fun thing to watch is the birds all take off. I just set mine for April 21st (full moon = many birds migrating), 0500 UTC end time (10:00 pm PDT), and just set it for 2 hours. Starts out with nothing much showing. Maybe some dust in the air or something, and then everything goes blue! It's incredible how many birds are in motion every night during the spring (some nights more than others). Bird migration is truly one of the awe inspiring enormous natural phenomena of the world.

More on nocturnal bird migration here: http://www.npwrc.usgs.gov/resource/birds/migratio/when.htm

More on NEXRAD monitoring of bird migration here: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/news/RadarTracking.html

A Google search on nexrad bird migration will show up more, too.