November 03, 2005 - Make way for the kingletsThe Suffolk Times • November 3,
Make wa
fort le kinglet
Luca wouLD HAvE rr that the other
day my wife ran into George, who
was excited about having seen a mass
of small birds migrating through Tru-
man's Beach in Orient. His description
excited Barbara, so she couldn't wait
to tell me. In no time, our plans for the
morning were put on the back bumer
and we were of£
At the end of the long breakwater,
we pulled over in hopes of seeing
any of the birds
George had
Focus spoken of Sure
O N enough, we coulc
see small birds
NATURE flitting here and
there, but the
by pain poor light and
Stoutenburgh thick cover to
the north didn't
give us a chance
to identify any of the little — no, tiny
— birds, so we decided to move on to
the parking lot at Truman's Beach a
short distance away. Here we'd have at
unobstructed view of any birds moving
to the west.
Suffolk Times photo by Paul Stoutenburgh
This tiny kinglet was looking for insects and got trapped in C.C. Bookout's
front porch some years ago. It was the only time I was ever able to photograph
a kinglet, as they are always on the move. Kinglets were among the thousands
of birds that recently migrated through the North Fork on their annual fall
flight to warmer climates in the south. — —
Both of us were unprepareu for
what we would see. True to George's
description, birds were everywhere
and on the move. The white eye ring
and wing bars of some made identifi-
cation easy; they were kinglets. Two,
six, 10 — you couldn't count them fast
enough. Then there were the myrtle
warblers with their yellow rump and
yellow patch just before'the wing-They
were already in their winter plum-
age, which is much less showy than
during the springtime, when they are
quite gaudy, with their yellow breasts
streaked with black. It's then you can
see the bright yellow rump patch and
the black cheek patch that makes the
male a handsome suitor.
Song sparrows and juncos were also
traveling along with the mass migra-
tion of mixed birds. Often we could
look to the east and see 40 or 50 birds
moving through at one time. Some
flew so close and so rapidly that they
seemed almost to fly into the car. I'm
not kidding when I say they came two
to three feet from our car before they
swooped up and over it.
We had the best seats in the house
and the players were all around us.
What made the show so exciting was
the 360 -degree view we had before us.
What lay to the east was a low tangle
of rosa rugosa that had its ripe, red ros
ps showing. They would be a good
source of food for someone later on.
And guess who was guarding it from
anyone who would dare to stop and
sample the bitter fruit — Mr. Mock-
ingbird. This was his food supply for
the winter and he didn't want to share
it with those passing by. You couldn't
blame him, for without that storehouse
of winter food he would surely perish.
Remember, like the cardinal, he, too, is
a recent comer from the South, where
there are many more pickings availabl
than up here in the North.
There were other small birds trav-
eling with the group, but I couldn't
identify them on the wing. Barbara's
sharp ears heard the,continual soft
chatter going on as the birds passed
by. I wonder what they were saying?
Perhaps nothing; perhaps their chatter
was a sort of identification or acted as
an invisible chain that held the group
together. As long as a bird heard the
chatter, it knew all was well.
Some birds migrate only at night,
while others, as we were seeing, travel
through the day. It does boggle your
mind to think these little bits of feath-
ers weighing but a few ounces travel
thousands of miles on their fall migra-
tion through good and bad weather to
spend their winters in warmer climates
along d,, Gulf Coast and Central
America, or on their spring migration
tot the vast reaches of upper Canada
and, yes, some go as far north as New-
foundland.
What do they do when they hit a
week of torrential rains such as we had
just recently? These small birds have
to eat to keep going. Somehow the vast
majority of them make it. Proof of it
was the migration Barbara and I wit-
nessed. We tried counting them — 15;
no, 40; two, then 20. It was difficult to
get an accurate count, so we decided
to use 25 per minute as an average._
Twenty-five times 60 minutes in an
hour would make 1,500 birds per hour.
Multiply that by four, and you have
6,000 birds flying by in just four hours.
The migration had started long before
we got there, so I think we could safely
say 10,000 birds passed by Truman's
Beach on 1Lesday.
And yet few people will have real-
ized that such a flight of birds passed
through our area. We had the advan-
tage of a funneling effect at Truman's
Beach that brought the birds right in
front of us. Soon after they passed
where we were, they would then
spread out over the land to the west.
That day will go down in our memory
book as one of nature's great spec-
tacles.
We've seen migrations before; the
one that comes to mind is the hawk
migration that takes place along the
barrier beach of the south side. On
one watch we counted over 500 hawks
passing by in an hour.
Something else that migrates is the
beautiful and colorful Monarch but-
terfly. It also travels along the south
shore barrier beach. Sorry to say we
see fewer and fewer of these migrating
butterflies, the reason being they were
winter killed in Mexico, where they
congregate by the thousands. So if you
have time and you're in the vicinity of
Truman's Beach or Smith Point Park
at the end of William Floyd Parkway,
stop by and you might just see one of