3 January 2026

Sandhill Cranes on the move:

On New Year’s Day three people in Allegheny County heard and saw a large flock of sandhill cranes flying south. Cranes are so unusual in Pittsburgh that they spawned Rare Bird Alerts.

Steve Gosser captured a photo of them over his backyard. (Blue sky!)

It is likely this flock contains birds that Steve saw in northwestern PA in December.

I thought Steve’s sighting was a One Day Wonder but yesterday Amy Henrici and Pat McShea saw a similar-sized sandhill crane flock circling over Aspinwall Riverfront Park. Look closely at Amy’s photo at top and you’ll notice that one of the cranes is missing a leg.

I was sorry to miss the cranes because I’m out of town, but what I saw here made up for it.

Snow Geese on the move:

Yesterday while on Route 222 near Breinigsville, Lehigh County, PA I saw thousands of snow geese flying west, bunching up, circling and coming in to land. This photo from Wikimedia is very similar to what I saw. I tried to count. 10,000?

I followed them to nearby cornfields and took photos with my cellphone.

Dark phase snow geese in the flock used to be called “blue” goose.

Why such massive bird migration into southern Pennsylvania?

Snow geese and sandhill cranes can stay north as long as there’s food but they move south when the ground is so snow covered that they cannot forage.

For instance the eastern North America population of snow geese overwinters in Atlantic coastal areas from Cape Cod to North Carolina but will stay in eastern PA if there’s not a lot of snow.

Sandhill cranes have a small breeding population in northwestern PA that will stay year-round if it can.

However, in the past three days a lot of snow fell in upstate New York and northwestern PA. There are more than 30 inches on the ground in Oswego County, NY!

My hunch is that the weather drove both species south but the snow will melt very soon. At Volant where Steve took the sandhills’ photo last month, the temperature will rise to 40°F on Tuesday and keep going to 56°F on Friday.

By midweek these birds can all go home.

16 November 2025

If you live in southwestern Pennsylvania and have a hummingbird at your feeder in November it’s guaranteed to be a Rare Bird — most likely a rufous hummingbird. This month there were rare hummingbirds at two private residences. Charity Kheshgi and I went to see one of them on Friday. (Thank you, Ron Burkert!)

Rufous hummingbirds (Selasphorus rufus) breed from the south coast of Alaska to California and Montana and spend the winter in Mexico and the Gulf Coast. However, a few have compass errors that lead them east instead of south. 

Normally this would be a fatal error but rufous hummers are so cold hardy that they return to their breeding grounds in April when there is still snow on the ground and can survive an Eastern winter as long as they have food — a heated hummingbird feeder that does not freeze.

The eBird Species Map below shows where they’ve shown up in October and November in the past three years, 2023-2025. Notice how many (purple) occurrences there are east of the Mississippi in those months!

The wanderers are often immature birds who’ve never made the trip before. Indeed the bird we saw on Friday was immature and was molting some of his head feathers.

He perched nicely on a twig so that Charity could film him.

These wanderers eventually head south. Some of them spend the winter in Florida. It’s a long way to go to find warmth.

12 October 2025

Yesterday morning BirdCast predicted high migration for our area but a distant nor’easter got in the way. By the end of the day Birdcast had changed its prediction but I didn’t see it until this morning and was quite surprised. What happened?

A nor’easter has been churning off of North Carolina’s Outer Banks bringing high surf, wind and heavy rain to southeastern Virginia and eastern North Carolina. As the sun set last night the storm was hitting those areas but its core was not tight yet (see 5:30pm green map below). At this point BirdCast had already changed their prediction.

By 9:30pm last night, birds were leaving our area but none were flying in. The rest of the state and most of the East Coast were a no-fly zone.

By this morning the nor’easter had tightened its core, the winds were much stronger and it was forcing east wind across Pennsylvania all the way to Pittsburgh. This wind map shows the air below 5000 feet — the region where most migratory birds fly overland.

You can see how it shut down migration over Pittsburgh in this BirdCast screenshot from 12 October at 5:30am EDT. The no-fly zone is now from Pennsylvania through South Carolina.

And the storm has certainly heated up. Here’s the latest from the OuterBanks via WRAL TV in Raleigh, NC.

No wonder the birds stayed put!