Do You Have New Neighbors?

This grackle just returned from the south

Bird migration is in full swing

A group of Sandhill Cranes flies past the moon

…fly by night…

Just a few hours ago

I started this post last week thinking here was something I could throw together quick that would be kind of cool. As almost always happens, it turns into a bigger task than expected. I would rather take more time and put some thought into something than just put something out there to put something out there. I hope you will find that approach more engaging.

At Quivera National Wildlife Preserve, snow geese in the foreground and sandhill cranes along the shore.

As I was drinking my coffee, I was perusing some of my favorite web sites. I have always been fascinated by birds, and it is really no surprise that I like to take pictures of them. Before I had a camera, I used a pair of binoculars and a field guide to birds to find out what I was seeing. Now I can take a reasonably close-up image of a bird and then look it up later at one of the websites. There are quite a few bird identifications sites to be found, I tend to use https://www.whatbird.com/ as my go to search. Seems to be a little easier to navigate than a lot of them.

This dark eyed junco kept me company for a few hundred feet on the trail.

There have been so many times that I have posted a picture of a bird and people have asked “what is that thing?” I now try to do my lookup before I put the pictures up. Of course, this leads to learning not only what kind of bird it is, but also some about its habits and range. They also discuss when they migrate and where to. There are a few kinds I have learned to name on sight, but there are a whole lot of different kinds of birds.

On my front porch, I even recognize that is a female cardinal!

Despite not retaining a lot of specific knowledge of when a particular species might be flying you do begin to get a feel for just how much birds move around. I know we have all seen pictures of weather radar where it looks like a big rainstorm and they tell us it is an insect or bird migration. I have always thought those were pretty neat. I find they have made quite a science of it with being able to predict over several days when and where large bird migrations will take place. They have created live feed to the weather radar to show the level of bird activity and direction of movement. It is amazing. And cool. The website for this is The website for this is: https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/live-migration-maps/ .

This was the first screenshot I made as I was writing this post. The vertical yellow line is the sunrise.

This is amazing to me that you can select a day, hit play and watch the flow of birds from 6 pm ET for a 24-hour period. A red line crosses the map at sundown, and a yellow line crosses the map at sunrise. The traffic rate shows up in color and the direction of movement as arrows. Who knew that the weather radar could tell us so much about our feathered friends?

The next four images show the status at sunset on March 26th, then a couple overnight, and finally the sunrise status. Easy to see why they say “fly by night”.

This is how things looked at sunset on the 26th

A bit before 1 am Central

A bit after 3 am Central

About sunrise

For a moment let us think about what those images mean. I am in Kansas, located just below the little green dot in south central Kansas which would be the Wichita weather radar. That evening, there were already birds flying at sundown, but the quantity picked way up after midnight. Then fell to almost nothing again at sunrise. Lets just say there were 5 hours of maximum traffic. By the color code we can see it was somewhere around 5000 birds crossing a 1 kilometer line every hour. About half the state was being covered by this movement, so say 350 kilometers. That means every hour 5000 birds x 350 kilometers = 1,750,000 birds per hour were crossing into Kansas from Oklahoma. At 5 hours of maximum traffic that would make 8,750,000 birds give or take a couple came to Kansas that night.

Snow geese come in for landing after a night of flying.

I do not know what breed of bird it is that is moving on any particular night, but I’m thinking if you were really paying attention to what birds are in your yard from one day to the next you would probably notice rapid changes. This has been going on night after night for about a month now. Just as soon as the worst weather left, the birds followed in. Thinking about those numbers of 8.75 million coming into Kansas overnight, well that’s just in my neighborhood. That level of activity extended all the way to Kentucky, or another 600 kilometers to the east. That amounts to another 15 million birds. So basically the Missouri and Mississippi flyways moved upwards of 24 million birds overnight. I find that amazing.

Snow geese circle for landing.

Huge flocks of geese settling onto the water to rest and eat.

So the answer to the question is “Yes, you do have new neighbors whether you know it or not.

Sandhill cranes heading for forage.