An Assessment of Unusual Bird Activity in a Suburban Yard...or Why I'll Never Be the 'Scientist' My Husband Is

On yet another very rainy and windy May morning this week I sat on my enclosed porch with my first cup of coffee, as usual. I could hear the house wren that took over the nest box this year, the catbird, the robin, even a red-eyed vireo singing, as usual.

Then I heard something else, a sharper tone with a cadence of 2, 2, 2. That's not a catbird, I realized, that is a brown thrasher.

The Cornell Bird Lab people say brown thrashers "are accomplished songsters that may sing more than 1,100 different song types and include imitations of other birds, including chuck-will’s-widows, wood thrushes and northern flickers." The male sings a loud, long series of doubled phrases.

An unusually visible brown thrasher (RE Berg-Andersson)

They are also usually secretive, which is why I could hear the bird in my yard but couldn't see it.

This is not a new yard bird. I've heard them calling from the Community Garden area bordering the backyards of my neighbors across the street. However, this May I've been hearing a lot of migrating birds I usually don't hear in my yard - Canada and magnolia warblers, for instance - which I could identify when I was using the Merlin app on my phone.

My theory is that when the southerly winds blew warm air into my area, the migrant birds came with it. Then the weather changed. The cold winds blew from the north. Those birds that had not made it to their breeding areas hung around to rest and eat ahead of eventually continuing their journey. 

But the wind was still coming from the north and the rain was still falling hard, with flash flood warnings in my state. So after hanging around one area for a while the birds move to another, and that has included my yard. 

I made the mistake of mentioning the unusual bird activity to my husband (MH).

"You should write a blog about it," he said. "Look in your records and see if this truly is an unusual year."

Now, you have to understand that MH thinks more like a scientist than I do. It is one of the many differences between us. He is a researcher. When he wants to know about something he takes a lot of time to go through the many, many volumes he has piled throughout the house. He keeps records of weather, sports and other events in neat column rows in ledger notebooks. He can look up what happened on a particular date in a particular year in minutes.

One of many notebooks I've kept over the years.
(Margo D. Beller)

This is something I can't do. I keep records as journal narratives in my notebooks. A lot of notebooks. To find something, such as how long ago the Nashville warbler showed up in the apple tree, means I would have to skim through years of notebooks.

In doing this project I learned a lot of things, and not all of them were about birds.

First, I realized yet again I will never be able to think the way MH does. My brain just does not work that way. Second, the way I keep records is not useful. It was hard for me to read more than a page of my handwriting because I tend to write quickly before I forget details. Some people keep journals to remember. I seem to keep them to do a brain dump. Trying to read through all the scrawled words I had put down over the years made me frustrated.

Third, until recently I had been using Merlin to alert me to birds singing around me. Merlin would hear things I didn't or couldn't. So every day I would stand in the yard to find out what was calling.

Which leads to: Fourth, I can be obsessive about spring migration birding.

I learned from my scrawls that when I could, in the past, I would do most of my May birding away from home. When I was working in an office that meant going out on the weekends, or very early in the morning if I was working from home. 

Now I'm retired and that has made a big difference. I no longer feel the need to "get it in" before giving my time to others. I can bird any weekday I want. However, there are many mornings when I rise early and can't get myself going for several hours. Those times are when I sit on the porch or in the backyard with my coffee and listen to what is singing or calling around me. Over a recent 10-day period that has been a lot of birds.  

Back to my research. 

(Margo D. Beller)

Years ago MH had given me a book where I could record a week of bird sightings (see photo above), a variant of what he does with his weather and other data. So in looking at bird patterns for past years I started with this because I had crammed years of sightings onto each page and it was far easier than trying to get through over 10 years of bird notebooks.

I restricted myself to data from my front or back yard for the month of May. I noted obvious migrants, particularly the colorful, singing warblers. For most of the years there would be one or two unusual yard birds, but occasionally there would be a lot of birds. For instance, in mid-May 2016 there were three types of warblers plus a blue-gray gnatcatcher and a rose-breasted grosbeak. Unfortunately, I did not note the weather conditions for the period.

More recently, on May 24, 2020, a new bird came to the yard - a singing bay-breasted warbler male I could easily see in one of the lower tree branches. Four years later, several birds were in the yard in mid-May including northern parula, yellow and myrtle warblers, indigo bunting, rose-breasted grosbeak and, another first, a female summer tanager - a type of bird usually found in the south but increasingly showing up in bird reports for my area.

The migrant birds would usually pass through my yard for a day or so on the way to elsewhere. That's in addition to the regulars - the crows, woodpeckers, wrens, catbirds, red-eyed vireos, finches, sparrows and others - that either stay in my area all year or end up here to breed, such as the house wren. 

Screenshot of BirdCast migration radar from just after sunset on May 1.
The brighter the yellow, the more birds.

Then I turned to what I recorded in my most recent notebook for this month. On May 2 of this year I saw on the radar there had been a big flight of birds the previous night thanks to the strong winds from the south. That day the yard had yellow, myrtle, parula, black and white and magnolia warblers. According to the NOAA weather data MH collects of Newark, NJ, the temperature on May 2 reached near 90 degrees F. No surprise that with these warblers I could also hear nearby singing rose-breasted grosbeak, chipping sparrow and scarlet tanager. On May 8 the yard hosted American redstart, yellow, myrtle, parula and blackpoll warblers. Many blackpolls, usually one of the last of the warblers I hear, passed through the yard for over a week. (I found an abundance of migrant birds in other areas, too.) 

Then the temperature went down to more seasonal levels because of a cold front and the wind picked up. May has been particularly windy, according to MH's records, with gale force winds (39 mph or more) for several days and on at least one day reaching storm force (55 mph or more) mid-month. No wonder the Canada warbler that showed up on May 17 hung around for a few days until the wind was light enough for it to continue flying north.

More recently, it has been unusually cold with a strong wind out of the east and rain - nor'easter weather, not conducive to bird migration. Nor is it conducive to sitting in the yard.

So were there more unusual birds than usual, or was I spending more time in the yard than usual with an app that let me know what I was hearing? My best non-scientific guess? Both.