no birds?

Diane Taggart, who runs the LI Birding site, sent me a communication from someone in Smithtown who bemoans the fact that there are no birds in her area. She literally means NO BIRDS and is clearly very upset about it.

There are two or three reasons why things seem quite birdless right now. One is that many of our local migratory birds have moved on while new arrivals from the north have not come in to replace them. In any case, there is no doubt that overall bird populations are down, seemingly due largely to factors that transcend our local problems. There may also be a weather factor as we are on the Eastern edge of the Atlantic flyway and many of the birds that we might expect to be here are in fact moving through the Hudson Valley and New York City!

This is, in any case, a kind of interregnum between summer birds and the major push of fall migrants. Watch for a cold front to bring a least some new arrivals. Some of them are already here. I just had a second report of EVENING GROSBEAKS, this one from Dan Wilson at Brooklyhaven National Laboratory. Has anyone else seen these birds? It's been years since we've had a major influx of these nothern beauties.

Things down here on Weesuck Creek in East Quogue are certainly quiet but the Am Robins keep moving across in small groups and there are flocks of Common Grackles in the neighborhood along with Blue Jays (collecting acorns), Common Crows, both wrens, three or four woodpeckers, House- and Goldfinches, a few warblers of several species and at least one Empid flycatcher. Most of the Red-winged Blackbirds are gone and the numbers of Tufted Titmice and Black-capped Chickadees have dropped precipitously. But there an influx of Gray Catbirds with a few Northern Mockingbirds feeding on the berries of the quantities of pokeweek, poison ivy and tupelo.

Eric Salzman