St. Lucia, 14 degrees north of the Equator and 60 degrees west of Greenwich (which puts me at about one thousand miles both east and south of New York City): The seasons here are nearly imperceptible, but I usually know when winter has arrived in the northern latitudes by the type, quantity and timing of the migrant birds who come through here on their way from their spring and summer grounds in North America to their Winter quarters in South America.
Easiest to notice are the shorebirds. There is a small kite whose Northern grounds reach from the coast of Maine to northern-most New Foundland Island. I watch for him first. If the eastcoast North Americans are going to have an early winter, he will show up in August or Early September. If it will be severe, they seem to show up in greater numbers and leave all at once instead of the two-weeks it usually takes. This probably means that there aren’t really more kites than last year, they just found it expedient for some reason to migrate all at once. This mass migration also has to do with the variance in food availability, which is dependent on the weather from the year before and therefore may not be a reliable indication of the severity of the coming winter. This little kite didn’t arrive until late October this year, with stragglers still arriving in mid-November, which told me that the North American winter would come late.
During Christmas week, I saw my first “foreign” Osprey. He comes from the southeast Atlantic coastline of Georgia and Florida. He was a couple of weeks late. In the Osprey, the male’s main body, face and head is almost all black or salt & pepper with white underwings, whereas the female has a white belly and face. (Our local Osprey has these differences in lesser distinction than the more highly defined Northern male and female). About a week later, Florida had a cold snap with temps in the high 40’s (F), which causes fish, the Osprey’s main source of nutrition, to head for the bottom and become scarce. Of all the migratory birds I’ve watched down here, the Osprey is the only one in which the male and female travel together. I assume it is due to their hunting partnership. As to all the other birds I’ve witnessed, the male usually arrives first with the female a few days to a week behind.
Red tail hawks arrive a bit earlier than the shorebirds and this means that the interior of the east coast, areas whose temps are not moderated by the presence of a large body of water, are about to get into the 40’s.
Two years ago a Bald Eagle pair built a huge nest in an ancient magnolia tree near here with a view encompassing miles and miles of forest and shoreline. This is a very rare occurance. Baldies have no reason to come this far south, but these did. In about mid-June, their three fat eaglets had passed their flying lessons sufficiently and they all took off one morning headed North.
In the first week of January, I saw what I thought was an enormous Silver Eagle. She was a voracious hunter, very efficient. I watched her continuously dive an parry for an hour from the top of a hill.These birds aren’t supposed to be here. The are from the New Mexico/Arizona area and rarely migrate beyond Central America before their return. I thought she must have been blown off course. Fascinating and beautiful. I watched her for a few days with binoculars. With a camera’s zoom, I was able to get a shot of her, including her talons. Her talons, four of them, were two-opposite-two and not three-opposite-one like a regular Hawk or Eagle. She had the talons of a Fishhawk. The two-opposite-two talon configuration allows the fishhawk to grasp slippery fish more efficiently than the three-opposite-one—this is the reason the fishhawk will almost always get the fish during an areal battle with a Red Tail or Baldie. She was an Osprey, a mutant, a big one, too. She was absolutely beautiful and perfect in every Osprey way. I wonder, knowing how finicky birds are about the company they keep, if she will breed and pass on those beautiful genes. I saw she had no partner in the sky above her. Usually they hunt in male-female pairs with one spotting from high above calling to the other who flies low and is ready to dive at all times. With no partner, she must be aggressive. I hope she makes it. About a week later she was gone on her way to South America.
Most of my birds here are from the Atlantic Flyway. But every once in a while I’ll see a Midwesterner who has taken to the eastern rivelet of the amazing Central Flyway. Most of these birds homes are in the Mississippi River Valley, but also as far east as the Appalatians and as far west as Nevada. I have a lot of respect for these guys. The Central Flyway is the longest of all flyways, reaching from Alaska to Patagonia and there are Yukon and Alaskan shorebirds such as a distinctive type of Sanderling and Sandpiper that sometimes come through here on their way to Tierra del Fuego. It is always a good day when I see one of these fellow travelers.
Bottom line: The North American birds arrived later this year.
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