The floodgates open with thousands of migrants

Sunrise at Whitefish Point. What a change from yesterday. There were very few clouds, and the winds with barely noticeable.

At the feeders there were Common Redpolls (he bird on the right) and our first Purple Finch female of the year. It was obvious that something good was going to come of the day.

A quick look from upstairs and it was obvious that there wasn’t a cloud to the south and west.

On my morning walk I found the remains of a Ruffed Grouse, Since we live under a raptor migratory flyway it is not uncommon to find feather piles.

I took a short walk over to the harbor to see if the snow had cleared around the rocks so that I could see the lichens growing there. These are two species that specialize in growing on granitic bolders.

It was time to head home and watch migration. One of the first surprises was seeing two Bohemian Waxwings near my roost. Then throughout the morning the floodgates opened and birds filled the skies. An obvious highlight was a Swainson’s Hawk. By the afternoon the species composition had shifted from almost entirely raptors to almost entirely Sandhill cranes.

The sky was often filled with close to a thousand cranes at a time. Huge Vs with hundreds of birds passed one after another, often merging into mega flocks. I know that the counters at the bird observatory had upwards of 7,000 cranes, as well as all of the expected diurnal raptors with the exception of a Broad-winged Hawk. Not bad for an otherwise slow start to migration.