A moderate northwesterly wind overnight Thursday into Friday minimized the flow of nocturnal migrants. A few birds seemed to be on the move, with marginally more birds departing than arriving, no doubt thanks to inclement weather to our south.

On Friday morning, with a limited amount of time, I decided to take a walk at Old Town house Park in North Yarmouth. There was decent diversity here today, but once again, I found a very low quantity of migrants. This park just really does not seem to reel in many migrants in the spring. But, I need more data – I especially need to check things out on a really big flight day. Most of the birds today seemed to be just-arriving breeding birds here, such as the 7 territorial Bobolinks and my first 2 Warbling Vireos of the spring. I also added a Solitary Sandpiper – a bona fide migrant, a Northern Mockingbird, and a Brown Thrasher to my fledgling patch list for this park. And, the one pocket of migrants that I did encounter in the woods included my first Magnolia Warbler of the year.

Then, on Friday night, there was a big exodus of birds - I think. Take a look at the 10:00pm radar. . .

But, looking at the velocity radar, this does not show the south to north pattern associated with migrant birds.

But, compare it to the 1:00am radar, where very little was visible.

If birds were in fact on the move out of the area, the storm to our south – which never did make it into Maine – clearly shut off our inflow of migrants for the night. Well, after the mass-arrivals of the past week, it’s only fair to have one light flight night. Nevertheless, our Saturday morning birdwalk to Portland’s Dragon Field (see our website for the full run-down) yielded 7 species of warblers among other fun stuff. Meanwhile, the Yarmouth skating rink pond right across the street from the store is currently hosting 3 Solitary Sandpipers and a Greater Yellowlegs.

There was a very good article in last Sunday’s Boston Globe (which I have been forgetting to mention all week) on the recent outbreak of a deadly illness that is killing thousands of bats in the Northeast – and what that may be telling us about the health of our ecosystems and our planet.

Meanwhile, 500 migrating ducks died when they landed in a tar sands tailings pond in Alberta recently. As tragic as this incident is, it has brought international attention to the development plans for Alberta tar sands that will have devasting ecological impacts.

And, just to pile on the good news, it looks like we’re about to see some major sea ice melting this summer.