The information/communications environment we now inhabit distorts our expectations. At least this is how it seems to some of us who began birding storms prior to the advent of the internet and mobile phones. Perhaps it could be argued that our expectations have simply been altered, not necessarily for the worse. It was pointed out to me several times, explicitly and implicitly, during the excited lead-up to Tropical Storm Henri, that I am now an old-timer. From that perspective, I think I can state accurately that my more humble expectations, which come naturally to me after decades of personal failures of various sorts while searching for birds, serve me well—and possibly better than the grander expectations that arise so easily now, based on the non-stop news cycle of other people’s successes, culled from a vast body of collective effort that constantly and noisily commands our attention.
And yet I definitely expected that this storm would produce at least a few Band-rumped Storm-Petrels, Black-capped Petrels, and White-tailed Tropicbirds, somewhere on Long Island or New England, if not for me personally. And I intended to do my best to put myself where I might find them. I also expected that the storm would displace some of the regular seabirds that inhabit our shelf waters at this time of year, and that it would force down difficult to see species that normally over-fly the coast at this season. Of these three modalities, my experience from 40-plus years of birding has been that the tropical/Gulf Stream results are by far the most variable from storm to storm. Indeed, each storm’s yield of such birds seems wildly uncertain and almost always defies predictions, for better or worse, despite our ever-increasing sophistication in terms of precedent and meteorology. The second mode, relating to our common seabirds, impresses me as being the most predictable. When a storm approaches our coast from the south, one will see Sterna and Laughing Gulls streaming eastward during the approach, and one will usually see some shearwaters and jaegers during the storm, if one is able to view the ocean. The third mode, southbound migrants whose ordinarily invisible overhead flights are obstructed and forced downward, almost always occurs in some fashion, but with much variation in terms of scale and species composition. Lesser Yellowlegs and Black Tern are the bread and butter of this cohort, Sabine’s Gull and Long-tailed Jaeger the caviar. Viewed this way, Henri’s avian impacts look less freakishly pathetic than they seemed at first. The greatest surprises, requiring some exploration, are (1) the near (or complete?) absence of tropical/Gulf Stream birds; and (2) the abundance and richness of the downed migrants. My intention from the beginning was to try to get east of the eye at landfall on Sunday and to be at an appropriate promontory to observe displaced birds flying back to the ocean on Monday morning. Initially it seemed that Montauk Point could serve both purposes, provided that one could get there, hide the jeep from the gendarmerie, and survive overnight. But the 11:00 p.m. tracking update obviated that. Patricia Lindsay and I would have to drive through the top of the storm to Rhode Island on Sunday morning and see what we could accomplish in my childhood haunts. It quickly became clear that this was not a physically large storm. It was calm with just light rain in Bay Shore at 7:00 a.m.; the rain was intense in Bridgeport, but just a little further east in New Haven, it was utterly calm with light rain at 9:07. We first noticed the wind picking up when we crossed the high, exposed bridge over the Connecticut River, and our pulses quickened when we re-entered our home turf in New London. There, on the Thames River bridge at 9:49, both wind and rain were intense. Dropping down to the RI coast along Rte. 1, I felt that perfect sense of excitement that I experience from being in a hurricane, irrespective of the birding angle. I couldn’t resist exploring some storm-roost spots in the Matunuck area, but this was in retrospect an error that was potentially quite costly. My plan was a pee-stop at Trustom Pond, a quick trip down to Mud Pond, inspection of Cards Pond and the fields to the east, then escape back to Rte. 1 via Matunuck Beach Road. But that road was blocked by fallen trees, as was Moonstone Beach Road when we tried to return that way, but Green Hill Beach Road was still open, so we escaped. >From there, everything went perfectly in terms of timing, access, etc. We were >able to bird the Point Judith Peninsula in relative comfort as the poorly >formed eye made land and we found loads of birds at all the regular >storm-roosts. The only problem was that all of the birds we saw were, with >only one possible exception, species expected as to time and place. With >effort we saw Manx, Great, and Cory’s Shearwaters, a Parasitic Jaeger, two >Black Terns, a good number of Roseate Terns, and four Lesser Black-backed >Gulls. The possible exception was an all-black seabird that raced rapidly >through my scope field without flapping, roughly the size and shape of a >jaeger or a Sooty Shearwater but appearing to me clearly neither of these, >based on its manner of flight. It wheeled up and dropped, and I never saw it >again. It might have been a Trindade Petrel, but, as P. A. Buckley likes to >say, “never will be” (unless it washes up on Scarborough Beach in the >near-future). 1. Why did Tropical Storm Henri fail to produce tropical/Gulf Stream birds? 1. It was small. 2. It was weaker at landfall than expected (we were out in it in Matunuck and Narragansett from 10:30 on; the strongest winds were during the 11:00-12:00 hour and not much more than 50 mph, maybe a little less). 3. The eye was poorly organized. It came over Pt. Judith about 12:15, but winds were still east of south until about 3:00, and only went west of south around 4:00; and these backside winds were surprisingly weak (<25 mph). 4. Maybe this small, weakening storm spilled whatever birds it had at Block Island? 5. Forming where it did, perhaps there were virtually no birds present within the center of circulation at the beginning, and it was small enough for everything to simply dodge it as it came up the Gulf Stream? Southeastern mainland RI experienced a lot of tree damage and loss of electricity. My mom’s house a little north of URI was fine, and her generator was working. We retrieved the table for her deck from where it had been placed out of harm’s way and enjoyed martinis on the deck, with branches, twigs, leaves, and leaf fragments strewn all about. Our house in Kingston had no power and no generator, so we begged some ice cubes, bread, and cheese from Mum, made sure we knew where our flashlights were, and dined in the gloaming. By 8:30 it was just a fine summer’s night, with our Barred Owl calling, then a little bit of guitar playing, then sleep. As Marshall Iliff emphasized in the pre-storm deliberations, it is almost always a good idea to stick to one’s plan, and we stuck to ours. We got on the 7:00 a.m. ferry in New London and birded it pretty hard all the way to Orient Point. I don’t mean to offend anyone, but the eastern LI Sound is a place I know well; it has many charms, but it can be one of most stunningly birdless places within my entire “exploded patch” of Staten Island, Long Island, southeastern Connecticut, and coastal Rhode Island. And so it seemed on Monday until we came around the Coffee Pot in Plum Gut, waved to Jay Rand standing at the Point, where we had planned to meet, then looked up. A perfect V of 77 Lesser Yellowlegs flew westward, with one dowitcher entrained. Hopes revived instantly. We joined Jay, who had seen a Black Tern. Mary Normandia joined us. It was, at least, a gorgeous morning. I think it was Mary who spotted them. “What are these coming at us from the north, low to the water?” I put my bins on the flock and said, “whoah!” They were Hudsonian Godwits, and they passed in perfect light so close that we could have caught one in a butterfly net. Another flock arrived from a more westerly bearing, but again passed close in perfect light, then flew off to the southeast. As Paul put it when he learned of the day’s events, our perseverance had “managed to extract victory from the clenched jaws of defeat.” Elated but very tired, Pat and I decided to head for home. But as we neared our car, we encountered Aidan Perkins, Luci Betti, and Patrice Domeischel. They were smiling and we were smiling; we exchanged news. They had just seen a flock of Hudwits cross to the bay, and earlier Aidan had seen yet another flock do so five miles to the west. We decided to stick with it a little longer. We returned to the Point and rejoined this trio, plus Mary. Yet another large flock of Hudwits came in from the west and passed us close. In terms of the third mode, Henri was one of the best storms I’ve ever birded: aerial insectivores and hummingbirds were numerous and taking interesting routes; a Solitary Sandpiper flew over, as did flocks of the more common shorebirds; a regular west to east fly-out of Laughing Gulls and Common and Roseate Terns caught the attention of a Parasitic Jaeger. But this flight of Hudsonian Godwits was almost without precedent and one of the most striking birding experiences of my life. A minimum of 324 birds passed from 08:54-10:03, between Orient Point and Trumans Beach (five miles to the west). Elsewhere, Hudsonian Godwits were seen this day along the Connecticut River in Massachusetts, the western Long Island Sound in Connecticut and Rye, NY, and at Robert Moses State Park in southwestern Suffolk County, Long Island. And a rare prize in the category of obstructed over-flying species was found by Doug Gochfeld at Riis Park, Queens, Long Island, in the form of a juvenile Long-tailed Jaeger. If we knew what we were going to see, we wouldn’t even try, I think. In reflecting on Tropical Storm Henri, some of the most vivid memories I will carry forward involve people: the countless times I invoked my mentor, P. A. Buckley; the erudition of Marshal Iliff, Doug Gochfeld, Jay McGowan, and others at the cutting edge of finding, identifying, documenting, and explaining the mechanisms of occurrence of vagrant birds; the excitement and anticipation of our many friends who gathered with us for our summer party at Heckscher Park on Saturday, as the storm approached—especially that of Andy Baldelli, who joined us via phone from Virginia as he contemplated driving up overnight, until the track ticked to the east of Montauk; and the recent losses of hurricane birders Tony Lauro, Bobby Kurtz, and Ned Brinkley. Ned was at Cornell when Bull’s Birds of New York State was compiled (published in 1998). It is a curious footnote that his species account for Hudsonian Godwit overlooked the then Long Island maximum count: two flocks totaling 41, circling and calling within the eye of Hurricane Bob on 19 August 1991, beheld by four astonished storm-birders at Montauk Point: Paul Buckley, Andy Baldelli, Bobby Kurtz, and Tony Lauro (The Kingbird 41: 287; North American Birds 46: 67). All four of the observers of that event had shared it, and their intense feelings about it, with Pat and me many times over the 30 years and four days that intervened between it and the event described here. Most or all of the birds in both events were adults en route to South America, were it not for a hurricane. One or two of them might have been there for both storms, as almost was true among their human observers. Shai Mitra Bay Shore -- NYSbirds-L List Info: http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsWELCOME.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsRULES.htm http://www.NortheastBirding.com/NYSbirdsSubscribeConfigurationLeave.htm ARCHIVES: 1) http://www.mail-archive.com/nysbirds-l@cornell.edu/maillist.html 2) http://www.surfbirds.com/birdingmail/Group/NYSBirds-L 3) http://birding.aba.org/maillist/NY01 Please submit your observations to eBird: http://ebird.org/content/ebird/ --
