This morning saw light winds and high overcast skies. At the Sunset Beach Morning Flight Count totals of 45 species and 5,192 individuals were counted.
Yellow-rumped Warblers, Tree Swallows, Red-winged Blackbirds and American Robins continue to move in good numbers. There was a good diversity of other birds mixed in, including the count’s first-of-season Blue-headed Vireo northbound, 14 American Pipits, a Dickcissel, and 52 Forster’s Terns moving south over the bay. A very strange sight was a young White-tailed Deer buck swimming straight out into the bay, eventually lost in the distance!
Over at the hawkwatch it was a slow day for raptors, with the raptor movement ending around midday. Morning flight at the hawkwatch was quite busy and including nice counts of 2,327 American Robins and 3,401 Yellow-rumped Warblers moving south. A Lincoln’s Sparrow also continued around the platform. Despite the erroneous claims of the Hawkwatch team, Sunset Beach leads the Hawkwatch in the Dickcissel World Series 13 to 12.
Westerly winds paid off in a big way this afternoon when a Say’s Phoebe was discovered at Custis Tomb Drive north of Kiptopeke! Say’s Phoebes are very rare vagrants from western North America, and this is the fourth record of this species on Virginia’s Eastern Shore. The phoebe put on a great show all afternoon as it hunted from roadside power lines and perched on a nearby house!
Northeast winds build tomorrow and will continue to increase in strength through midweek as a low pressure system slides up the coast bringing rain chances by Tuesday.
Follow along with our counts live every morning on our Trektellen pages:
Sunset Beach Morning Flight: https://trektellen.nl/count/view/3748/20251026
Kiptopeke Hawkwatch: https://trektellen.nl/count/view/4022/20251026
