Migration Counts

With just over a week left in the season, the makeup of migrants counted from the waterbird shack has continued to change. Long-tailed Ducks are still being seen in triple-digit totals regularly, and are by far the top species counted with a current total of 20,960, but they no longer dominate each day’s flight quite [...]

Watching waterbirds is always an unpredictable endeavor, and can be quite the exercise in patience. The past week has held great examples of the days that make the seemingly endless hours of tedium all worth it. Last Tuesday began with a strong flight of Aythya and Scoters, along with an great smattering of dabblers for [...]

Today was the first day snow fell on me during the waterbird count! I saw snow across Lake Superior in Canada’s Algoma Highlands on September 29, over two weeks ago, and Saturday was the first day I brushed off my car before heading to the Point for sunrise, but today’s precipitation was my first opportunity [...]

The season is just past halfway through, the weather has certainly changed, and with it so has the diversity of migrants being seen on the WPBO waterbird count. Perhaps the biggest constant this season has been the Red-necked Grebes. Though their peak day of 2,954 was well over a month ago they haven’t stopped yet, [...]

Autumn has officially begun, and with the days now shorter than nights, an increasing diversity of waterbirds are headed to their wintering grounds. Though the number of dabbling ducks is dwindling, a bump in divers has given the WPBO fall migration count plenty of action. Aythya ducks have arrived, with a total of 397 unidentified [...]

Despite a strong headwind both days, thousands of waterbirds migrated past Whitefish Point on Tuesday and Wednesday! Following several slow days of warm weather and southerly winds, I wasn’t expecting to see much migration on Tuesday as conditions were set to stay the same. The day got off to a promising start though, with a [...]

For me, the highlight of the past few days has been the shorebirds! I’ve always particularly enjoyed watching them scramble along a beach or a breakwall, even before I began to seriously tackle the notoriously difficult challenge of learning to distinguish one peep from the next. Today I finally caught up with one of my [...]

It’s hard to believe summer in the UP is already winding down, and fall migrants are here! It seems like just the other day that a Mississippi Kite zipped by me on the final weekend of the spring hawk count. In fact, for some species fall migration has been well underway for some time. Though [...]