Birders in Quebec got the thrill of their lives this year, witnessing more than a half million migrating warblers in only 9 hours.
Ian Davies, an avid birder of 14 years, had traveled to 35 countries in search of all things feathered, but says this was “the greatest birding day of [his] life.”
Davies and a group of birders made the 600-mile trip from Ithaca, New York to Tadoussac, Quebec in hopes of witnessing the warbler migration — the epic 3,000-mile journey the wandering birds make every spring.
Let’s just say it was worth the long drive.
The weekend was initially rather underwhelming, with the group witnessing only sporadic groups of warblers. The following Monday, however, was straight out of a birder’s dream. After a rainy start to the day, the skies began to clear. It was then that the warblers started showing up by the hundreds and thousands.
“For the next 9 hours, we counted a nonstop flight of warblers, at times covering the entire visible sky from horizon to horizon,” he wrote on the popular birding website eBird. “The volume of flight calls was so vast that it often faded into a constant background buzz.”
A video uploaded to video shows just a tiny fraction of the warblers seen during the event:
How on earth do you count so many birds in flight? It wasn’t easy, says Davies.
“Counting birds and estimating species composition was the biggest challenge of the day—balancing the need to document what was happening with the desire to just bask in the greatest avian spectacle I’ve ever witnessed.”
Estimates are made by observing the number of individuals passing a flight line in a particular field of view, then taking the average birds/second observed to estimate the number over a given time period.
During 9 hours of viewing, the total counted was a whopping 721,620 – five times the previously recorded day count for warblers. And, the actual total was likely even higher.
“Other observers in the area had multiple hundreds of thousands, so there were likely more than a million warblers moving through the region [that day],” Davies documented.
Here’s another video of some of the warblers flitting by at eye level:
Feature image: Canada Warbler/Ian Davies
