20 years ago I operated seven avian night flight call monitoring stations in a transect across NY. This year I’ve been repeating the study and have been posting call totals and species data by 8AM to http://www.oldbird.org/Data/Daily.htm. Cumulative weekly data is now available every Tuesday at http://www.oldbird.org/Data/TransNE/NETransect.html A single night of transect data that used to take a month to process by real time listening can now be processed and online by the next morning.
The consistencies in the patterns that emerge are mindboggling. One of the striking patterns is the roughly five times more abundant Parula night flight calling down the Connecticut River Valley versus the Hudson. Conversely, in the past two weeks Chestnut-sided has been a three times more abundant caller in the Hudson River Valley than the Connecticut. Perhaps these differences have been noticeable in the warbler flock composition on Long Island versus the western burbs of NYC. For those out at night in NY hoping to hear the fine buzzy night flight calls of Lincoln’s Sparrow and Swamp Sparrow, the presence of such call types in the mix increased from about one in every 200 warbler & sparrow night flight calls two week ago to between one in 50-100 last week, and they will likely be more abundantly heard in the week ahead. If you live downstate and you want to hear Hooded Warbler night flight call, your chances are pretty slim -- perhaps one call out of every thousand. Head to Jamestown where it appears you’ll bump your odds up to one in every hundred. These are real patterns of avian night flight calling. One can’t make this stuff up! Bill E -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birdingonthe.net/mailinglists/NYSB.html Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
