[Blackpolls, strong fliers that they are even at 5 1/2 inches long, highlighted this morning's flight at Higbee Beach in Cape May, NJ. A small number of them, with other species mixed in. Tomorrow? Best flight of year for warbler abundance and diversity? Date and weather are both right.]
Front passed too late last night, wait until tomorrow, blah blah. .. but it's not blah blah when it comes to tomorrow, i.e. Monday September 24, late September and great weather conditions leave us pretty excited. The
Zzeep is for the high buzz flight note of
Blackpoll warbler, one bird that flew last night and was in evidence this morning, both at morning flight and in Cape May's copses.
[Blackpoll Warbler, Cape May Point State Park this morning. Green back with streaks, yellow breast with faint streaks, bright white undertail coverts, with yellow feet clinching separating it from Bay-breasted.]
[A flycatcher with especially long wings - Eastern Wood-pewee at the Higbee Beach, NJ dike this morning.]
[Juvenile Sharp-shinned Hawk , upper bird, hassles a juvenile Broad-winged Hawk, this morning over the hawk watch platform in Cape May Point State Park. An ace-in-the-hole field mark on distant backlit raptors is this: buteos show hard dark tips to the flight feathers, accipiters do not. Proportions also differ, obviously.]
[Long-tailed Skipper, a pretty southern vagrant, one of over a dozen haunting Cape May Point gardens this morning.]
Don, your pictures are always fabulous, but the shot with the Sharp-shinned and the Broad-winged is KILLER! And I was lucky enough to be standing next to you when this happened. Great work, really fabulous.
ReplyDeleteThanks, Mark! It was good to have some time up there hanging out with you.
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