By Mary Alice Hayward

Mary Alice Hayward never thought much about birds until after retiring in 2021 and waking up one spring day to a bird attacking her dining room windows. Curiosity led her to find out what it was: a Great Crested Flycatcher.  With that, her eyes opened up to discover and fall headfirst, deep down into the birding world.  Mary Alice lives and birds on the Outer Banks barrier islands on the Atlantic Ocean, North Carolina, USA.  She travels often and birds every day, no matter where she goes.  Her favorite birds are the black and white ones.

It’s that time of the year when you wake up and realize that fall migration season is starting.  How?  The Cornell Lab of Ornithology BirdCast migration dashboard is back online!  My first look shows we have had some action already during the first few days of August.  Out here on the Outer Banks of North Carolina in the United States, we are on the United States’ Atlantic coast flyway.  Cornell’s BirdCast dashboard uses our county as the identifier for locating and tracking migrations along the Outer Banks. Search for “Dare County, North Carolina” and you will find the number of birds that crossed the county from the night before, the “peak migration traffic” for the night, the direction, speed, and altitude.  What’s even more exciting is the “expected nocturnal migrants.”  Now we have new birds visiting to count, photograph, and admire.  This is a major thrill and a motivator to go out and look for these passing visitors. 

At the same time, our local GroupMe for OBX Birders Rare Bird Chat Group has started chiming, after weeks of sporadic pings, but more often silence. It’s impossible not to get excited and feel the rush of the start of the hunt. Our local star birders are posting excitedly, while we less star birders chase their findings and at the same time hope for a star sighting ourselves.  Even as I write, I have just had three pings from our star birders this morning. What’s exciting them? “Impressive tern numbers building along the south beach and feeding around the point and shoals, over 250 blacks and 78 roseates leaving the roost…”  So here we are in the Outer Banks of North Carolina, migration season is underway, and the sleepy summer is over. So exciting!

Illustration: Cornell Lab of Ornithology (screenshot)