It's still July but the birds of late summer are starting to show. The Spotted Sandpiper has been on the pond for the past week or more. This morning, there was a Northern Waterthrush perched, preening and chinking away on a low dead branch of the scraggly Red Cedar on the opposite bank of the pond. I suspect that this midsummer arrival may have also been here for a bit; I thought I heard the call a few days ago but this is the first one that I have actually seen. And calling Royal Terns have been moving up and down Weesuck Creek this morning -- noisy enough so that I hear them back at the house; up until today, I have seen one Royal on the creek but there were many in Moriches Bay yesterday morning so they have arrived in numbers. Spotted Sandpiper is a sparse local breeder but the other two do not breed on Eastern Long Island and they are definitely arrivals from elsewhere.
Northern Waterthrush, as its name suggests, breeds to the north while the big, spectacular terns are southern breeders (north to southern New Jersey I believe). Both species disperse after breeding and both will be around for the rest of the summer. If this is early migration, how do we explain the fact that these are birds that are moving in exactly opposite directions? A while back (in an article I wrote for Birding Magazine), I suggested that these arrivals were not really migrants but rather 'summer visitors': i.e. birds that moved off their breeding territories, often with young in tow, to look for rich feeding grounds for themselves and their offspring with the goal of fattening up in preparation for the real business of migrating south later on.
Eric Salzman
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