Birding Through the Year: October 2022

by David Hoyt

“If our disquiet is profound, it is because each of us is beginning to sense the ground shifting beneath our feet. It is dawning on us that we are all in migration.”
—Bruno Latour (1947–2022), Down to Earth

Migration usually catches me by surprise. It always seems too early. The leaves are still thick on the trees, and the sun still warms the beaches by the lake. Migration should come when the thudding drums of frost begin their heavy march south over the plains, driving warm-blooded creatures before them. Not in August, before the kids have gone back to school. So it has seemed to me, my head full of uninformed notions, since I first started paying attention.

Yet here they are, a few forward warblers, and a quiet Winter Wren or two, scurrying under the brush, or scaling the drying stems of our prairie garden, left standing expressly for them. They are only a surprise to me because I have failed to think like a bird. I am all too human: improvident, waiting to the last minute, removed from all that ties me to cycles of change in the soil, air, and climate.

It is better, after all, not to leave your camp only after all the food has vanished, but rather a little before.

A day comes when the Chimney Swifts make this calculation, and disappear. In my patch, theirs is the departure that signals the beginning of the broad tide of biota withdrawing from the higher reaches of the continent. I notice it almost instantly within the frame of sky bounded by the tree line of my backyard. Little else is changed: the cicadas still call into the dusk, the angle of the sun is only slightly lower, other birds appear unconcerned. But one afternoon, the quadrant above our yard is suddenly blank, empty of the broad arcs and parabolas traced by summer’s flying geometers.

The next departure is closer to the ground. By now, the signs of autumn are crowding around us. Nectar-producing plants are fewer and fewer, and temperatures are beginning to dip. I fail to see the hummingbirds for a day or two, and conclude with regret that they have moved on. I am wrong. They appear the next day, one after the other, at the feeder. I begin to wear a jacket on evening walks, and wonder how such small animals can possibly tolerate the overnight chills. I sight them sporadically into mid-September. Their eventual departure lacks the clear definition of the swifts’. I anticipate it, even worry over it. When it comes, it is only understood at a delay, like an email to a friend left unanswered.

Arrivals begin to balance departures. What is most gratifying is where they are observed. This fall marks the end of a first growing season for our front yard’s prairie planting. In this area I now see a Palm Warbler, then two, moving through the desiccated grasses and stems. A Golden-crowned Kinglet flits from stalk to stalk in an area that one year previously was nothing but turf grass. A handful more of what Roger Tory Peterson famously labeled confusing fall warblers pass through the prairie, taking what they need from this relatively small area just yards from the city street. The garden should be even richer next year; will it attract still more migrants?

It is already attracting more winter lodgers. I am surprised at how happy I am, smiling in my pajamas, when I open the door one October morning to flush, instead of the summer’s gang of goldfinches, a crew of Dark-eyed Juncos. This year these arctic birds have arrived in number. Like the warblers, they use the prairie for food and for the cover it provides. Unlike the warblers, they will use it all winter.

The juncos’ arrival marks a fullness in the transition of the seasons. There are cold winds and driving rains now, and episodes of light snow. But these are increasingly interspersed with days of unseasonable warmth. Though the climate is sending confusing signals, the delicate architecture of migration appears to hold together for now. It provides to humans a welcome sense of regularity in the natural order of things.

But the same sophisticated tools of computing and data collection that allow us to model scenarios of a changing climate allow us to model corresponding changes in bird populations and, with increasing rigor, to forecast large-scale migrations of human beings. Climate change not only threatens established patterns of bird migration, but has the potential to cause unprecedented and rapid migration of people from areas that are no longer hospitable to them. In the Western Hemisphere, the most severely affected regions for birds and people overlap in tropical Central America. Indeed, for humans in that region, the migration has already begun, as it has elsewhere. We truly are all, or soon all will be, in migration.

While writing these lines, I hear an airborne gurgling outside my window. I stop what I’m doing and rush out into the sunshine to look up. There is a cool north wind blowing. In the shape of a V, almost directly above our yard, pass a flock of 50 to 60 Sandhill Cranes. Seventy some years ago, there were less than 100 known cranes in Wisconsin. Now several hundred can pass over our yard in a day. They are a conservation success story.

The challenges presented by climate change are orders of magnitude greater than those originally facing the Sandhill Cranes. But we know that, when the right decisions are taken and adhered to with commitment, success can result. It must now be done on a scale far greater than ever before.