Hi Andy and all, I would guess that your impressions this spring have been shaped by a couple of important factors. Where you live on eastern Long Island is an area where passage migrants are usually scarce under any but the most extraordinarily fortuitous circumstances, but where modest breeding populations of many Neotropical migrants live. Thus, the usual experience of a migration watcher in your area is a fairly steady procession of arrivals of breeders that is only weakly correlated with the details of daily weather, plus a small number of widely spaced encounters with modest numbers of passage migrants.
Forest Park is utterly different, of course. For a variety of geographical reasons, it hosts huge but highly variable numbers of passage migrants, but relatively few breeders. Thus, it is possible to have great days there (like your first visit) and dismal days there (like your second). The “quality” of migration there, at least in its broad outlines, is strongly influenced by weather but perversely inscrutable in its details. It is probably the resulting pattern of aperiodic reinforcement that makes so many New York City birders seem a little odd to us Long Islanders. They generally know when it is going to be a good day versus a poor day, but they are almost never able to distinguish the extraordinary ones from the merely excellent ones in advance. And similarly, although it is usually possible to guess when a day will be poor, it is exceedingly difficult to know in advance whether it will nevertheless yield a small set of rich surprises or be absolutely punk. Perhaps this is the foremost thing that makes bird migration so appealing: its astonishing predictability at one scale (e.g., the remarkable uniformity in arrival dates for many species from year to year), in combination with its utter cussedness and intractability in terms of foretelling exactly where and when large, easily observed concentrations of migrants might be observed. The fact that a birder could go to one of the best migration traps in the state on a date within the period of heavy overall migration during one of the best springs in memory and see almost no migrants at all, although understandably frustrating, is also inspiring in the sense that it hints at the mysterious forces motivating all the birds that were there just before that day, and those that will be there again on a few more good days this spring. The overall factors influencing the timing and spacing of migration had been explained fairly well by the late 50s and early 60s. Curiously, it is my impression that only very minor improvements to those old rules of thumb have been achieved since, even though the challenge has continued to grip practically everybody’s attention, and despite the diverse and increasingly sophisticated technologies that have been brought to bear on the problem. Shai Mitra Bay Shore ________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] on behalf of [email protected] [[email protected]] Sent: Monday, May 26, 2014 12:21 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [nysbirds-l] Birding at Forest Park, Queens County, LI, NY Traditionally Forest Park has been one of the better places to see migratory birds in May. I did see quite a few two weeks ago, including quite a few warblers,when I visited the fresh water ponds, where the birds visit and one can usually see them up close and get nice pictures. I thought I would take the opportunity of the long weekend to drive in from Westhampton LI, on Sunday since I figured the car traffic would be low, with fewer cars in the middle of the holiday weekend, (It usually takes 1 1/2 hours or more to drive in and more to return East.) I was right about the traffic,I made great time to get there and return. However the birds were very sparse. I saw only one warbler (Water thrush) and did not get a decent look either. Only bird worth mentioning was a immature Red Tail Hawk, who spent hours there, even taking a bath before going back to roust up in the trees. This concerns me because I understood that the migration was later this year because of the cold spring, and we could expect greater migration later. But, based on my observations so far, the bird migration is way off in numbers this year. I would appreciate some comments on this (and maybe suggestions). Andy Murphy ________________________________ CSI Represents NY in Nationwide State Rankings. Learn more>>><http://csitoday.com/2014/04/csi-represents-ny-in-nationwide-state-rankings/> -- 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/ --
