The mix of migrating songbirds is changing this month, but migration is still in full swing. When the weather is right, songbirds take off an hour+ after dusk and may fly eight hours to stop just before dawn. Last week was especially intense for migration, as described by BirdCasts’s Kyle Horton for NBC 7 San Diego.
All of these nighttime migrants are flapping. How much energy does this use up?
Back in 2005 a biotelemetry study of Swainson’s thrushes measured heartbeat and wingbeats in flight and concluded that they flapped about 11 beats per second on sustained migration. In eight hours that means about 311,000 wingbeats — a lot of flapping for a small bird — and some of them flap even more, such as the ruby-crowned kinglets who’ve just started to pass through our area.
Northern finches don’t leave home for the winter unless their winter food — seeds from cones and catkins — is scarce. Last weekend the Finch Research Network published the Winter Finch Forecast 2025-2026, that predicts which northern finches will visit lower Ontario and perhaps the U.S. The news looks good for an irruption this winter.
It looks to be a flight year for many species in Eastern Canada. With mostly very poor crops in the boreal forest from central Quebec westward to Manitoba, this has the potential of being the biggest flight year since 2020-2021.
Red-breasted nuthatches (Sitta canadensis) are a great indicator of an irruption year and are already in Pittsburgh since September. They resemble their white-breasted cousins but are smaller, red-breasted (of course), prefer conifers, and make a nasal “ank, ank” sound.
Red-breasted nuthatch (photo by Chuck Tague)
Purple finches (Haemorhous purpureus): “Most Purple Finches will migrate south out of Eastern Canada this winter with some making it to the deep southern States.” These finches look a lot like the house finches that come to your feeders year round so be careful when you identify one. Here’s how to tell the difference –> Purple and House.
The male looks he was dipped headfirst in berry juice. All of his belly stripes are rosy pink (not taupe).
The female purple finch looks like an unusually dark house finch with a big beak. Her belly stripes are thick and brown (not taupe).
Female purple finch (photo by Chuck Tague)
Pine siskins (Spinus pinus) visited in 2020-2021 and are predicted again this winter. “A moderate to possibly strong flight of siskins will move southward, possibly as far south the mid Atlantic states.” Pine siskins are small, very stripey, have yellow accents on their wings and tail and thin sharp beaks.
They like the same food as American goldfinches but are significantly smaller.
Pine siskin at feeder with American goldfinch (photo by Lauri Shaffer)
Redpolls (Acanthis flammea): “Expect a probable strong flight south out of the boreal forest east of Lake Superior southward into the lower great lakes, eastward through northern New York, New England and the Maritimes.”
You’ll find them on birches anywhere (even in urban areas), in weedy fields and at bird feeders offering nyjer®and black oil sunflower seeds.”
Evening grosbeaks (Coccothraustes vespertinus) “There should be a moderate flight of Evening Grosbeaks southward this fall. A few birds are likely make it to Pennsylvania and perhaps the higher elevations of the Mid-Atlantic States as well.”
Evening grosbeak, January 2013 (photo by Steve Gosser)
So keep your eyes peeled this winter. New birds are coming south.
Warblers chasing each other in the fog, Schenley Park, 28 Sept 2025 (photo by Jeff Cieslak)
29 September 2025
Yesterday morning it was very foggy when three of us began birding at the Bartlett end of Schenley Park. I thought the birds would be sleeping but newly arrived warblers and a hummingbird chased flying insects and each other. They also gleaned tiny bugs from wet leaves.
The birds were so awesome that we stood still for half an hour while they flew around us. Jeff Cieslak took many photos that were essential for identifying the birds we could barely see. Here are just a few of those he posted at his Facebook group: Our Daily Bird.
Despite the challenges we identified 10 warbler species and a mystery “new world warbler sp.” The birds were in fog and low light levels …
Nashville warbler in muted fall colors, Schenley Park, 28 Sept 2025 (photo by Jeff Cieslak)
… and hiding in the leaves.
Black-throated green warbler obscured by leaves, Schenley Park, 28 Sept 2025 (photo by Jeff Cieslak)
There was harsh light and shadow when the sun broke through.
Northern parula doing calisthenics, Schenley Park, 28 Sept 2025 (photo by Jeff Cieslak)
And some of the warblers were incredibly active. This one was Best Bird because he zigzagged past us repeatedly while chasing a bid and then landed on a twig in a dark thicket. The photo shows he’s a blackpoll warbler.
Blackpoll warbler lands in the shadows, Schenley Park, 28 Sept 2025 (photo by Jeff Cieslak)
At 10:30am the fog lifted and we saw one more flurry of warblers. Then the day heated up, Jeff took this photo and the birds retreated to the interior forest.
Schenley Park outing, 25 August 2024 (photo by Kate St. John)
Here’s our checklist.
Schenley Park — Bartlett (40.434, -79.936), Allegheny, Pennsylvania, US Sep 28, 2025 8:30 AM – 10:50 AM Protocol: Traveling, 1.0 mile(s), 28 species (+2 other taxa)
Dress for the weather and wear comfortable walking shoes. Bring binoculars and field guides if you have them. NOTE that re-construction of the Serpentine Road retaining wall has changed the landscape and forced a limited trail closure. If the group is not too large we’ll walk the creek bed trail.
Visit my Events page before you come in case of changes or cancellations.
(*) If the birding is suddenly good at 10:30am we’ll have the option to continue to 11a.
(photos by Kate St. John)
Information on Great Race road closures on the morning of 28 September 2025
For a zoom-able closeup of the 2025 Great Race map, click here or on the screenshot below.
Barricades will be set up throughout the city to clear the race route which stretches along Forbes Avenue from Frick Park in Squirrel Hill to Morewoood Avenue at Carnegie Mellon (Morewood is the Forbes to Fifth connector). It then uses Fifth Avenue through Oakland and the Boulevard of the Allies into Downtown, ending at Point State Park.
Approximate closure times are as follows:
Zone A (green): Forbes at Beechwood Blvd to Forbes at Morewood: 8:30 a.m. to 10:00 a.m. This is where the 10K run starts at 9:30am
Zone B (purple): Forbes at Morewood to Fifth & Bigelow Blvd: 8:30 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
Zone C (orange): Fifth & Bigelow to Fifth & the ramp to the Blvd of the Allies: 6:30 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. This is where the 5K run starts at 8:00am
Zone D (red): Fifth & Blvd of the Allies to Commonwealth Place & Liberty Ave: 6:30 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. Finish line of both races.
Since I live north of Fifth I’m going to move my car south of Forbes early in the morning so I can get to Bartlett.
Interestingly, BirdCast predicted that the night before would have Low Migration yet the number and variety of birds banded early yesterday was high. Nick says they have never been able to correlate busy banding days with bird forecast predictions.
Best Bird yesterday was an adult female mourning warbler, pictured at top. My photo isn’t very good so I’m including one from Nick Liadis @bird_lab on Instagram.
Other beauties included American redstarts … (I got to release one of them!)
Female American redstart, 16 Sept 2025, Bird Lab at Hays Woods (photo by Kate St. John)
… a very cooperative white-eyed vireo …
White-eyed vireo, 16 Sept 2025, Bird Lab at Hays Woods (photo by Kate St. John)
… an ovenbird …
Ovenbird, 16 Sept 2025, Bird Lab at Hays Woods (photo by Kate St. John)
… and a common, somewhat secretive warbler in an uncommon pose. Very yellow!
Common yellowthroat, 16 Sept 2025, Bird Lab at Hays Woods (photo by Kate St. John)
When he turns his head it’s easy to see he’s a common yellowthroat.
Common yellowthroat, 16 Sept 2025, Bird Lab at Hays Woods (photo by Kate St. John)
I was so excited about the birds yesterday that I forgot to take a photo of the banding operation so here’s a three year old photo. The operation is essentially the same, but now Nick has 14 mist nets and Shaina, Dana and Kathleen to help.
Nick Liadis and Lisa Kaufman, bird banding at Hays Woods, 7 Sept 2022 (photo by Kate St. John)
Learn more about Bird Lab or schedule a visit to a banding site at birdlab.org.
Northmoreland Park in Apollo, PA has a lake, walking paths, mountain bike trails and playing fields but is rarely visited by birders because there are few species of interest, just the usual suspects. All of that changed on 16 August when Mark McConaughy photographed a Baird’s sandpiper on the mudflat at the lake.
Baird’s sandpipers (Calidris bairdii) are rare in Pennsylvania because they breed in the arctic, winter in southern South America, and migrate over the Great Plains.
Something diverted this individual from it’s normal route, perhaps bad weather or the wildfires in Canada. It veered east, entered southwestern Pennsylvania, and looked for a good place to land — a mudflat — just before dawn.
If southwestern PA wasn’t in a drought there would have been no mudflat and the Baird’s would have kept going. Instead he stayed for two days and attracted 9 more eBirders.
This time of year is shorebird migration season so birders continued to stop by to check the mudflat. “A rare bird was here and conditions are right for another one, so I’ll take a look just in case.” I like to call this The Rare Bird Effect. In Arizona there’s a similar concept called the Patagonia Picnic Table Effect. (Thank you, Deb Grove, for reminding me of it.)
The Rare Bird Effect paid off at 7:11pm on 4 September when Susan Miller photographed a phalarope. Merlin said it had to be a red-necked phalarope, which is rare but not impossible, but Susan thought that didn’t look right. Her photos helped identify it as a red phalarope (Phalaropus fulicarius) a super-rare bird in the continental interior because it winters on and migrates over the open ocean. Here’s what she saw.
The red phalarope stayed two days, 5 and 6 September, and generated 40 more eBird visits including the photo at top by Steve Gosser and photos below by Phillip Rodgers. The bird came close to shore for great photos!
Some of us showed up on 7 September, the morning after it left. Alas!
Right now Northmoreland’s mudflat is quite a birding hotspot so it’s worth checking just in case. “You see a lot by looking.”
Now that Nick Liadis’ Bird Lab has been banding birds for five years in the Pittsburgh area, an analysis of spring and fall data shows the similarities and differences between the three banding sites:
Hays Woods in the City of Pittsburgh
A suburban site in the South Hills
A rural site in Butler County.
The results were surprising. As the Post-Gazette reports, during fall migration Hays Woods has more birds and more species than both the suburban and rural sites. The Connecticut warbler pictured at top, banded there last October, is one such example of autumn bird diversity at Hays Woods.
Here are aerial maps of the three locations as screenshots from Google Maps. Notice the texture of the surrounding land. Hays Woods is a green oasis in the city.
Nick explains:
“The birds are probably zeroing in on Hays Woods because it’s a large blip of green in an urban area,” he said.
“When daybreak comes, they are looking for the best habitat. Hays Woods is higher up in elevation with forest, power-line cuts that are meadows and woodland edges.”
In the fall, various species of migrating birds gravitate to open areas near power lines flanked by trees and brush, Liadis noted.
BirdCast predicts that the next two nights, 10 and 11 September, will be fantastic for bird migration. The forecast screenshots, above, show that 261,000,000 to 294,000,000 birds will pass over the continental US in just two nights. Tonight and Thursday night it’s Lights Out For Birds, Please! Yes, turn lights out at home. If you’re not familiar with what to do, read on.
Birds that migrate at night use celestial lights for navigation and are often fooled by and attracted to our electric lights. This is especially true of warblers who hatched in dark sky places and are unfamiliar with human lights. They collide with lit buildings or exhaust themselves flying circles around them.
Isn’t bird collision just a tall building problem? No. Amazingly the toll at homes — in total — is higher than total collisions at tall buildings because there are so many more homes.
The lights at this house would fool migratory birds. (Fortunately it is lit for Christmas when no birds are migrating.)
Your home might have a problem you’re not aware of.
Do birds hit your sliding glass door? Do you find dead birds occasionally below your windows? You can do your bit on high migration nights by closing drapes and turning off outside lights. (Motion detection lights are fine.)
The cool thing is that you don’t have to be a building manager or a scientist to help migratory birds. You can help them with Lights Out practices on the few high migration nights each season.
Peregrine (Gusto) comes in for a landing, February 2022, Ohio (photo by Chad+Chris Saladin)
9 September 2025
Yesterday I mentioned that though many peregrines migrate, Pitt’s peregrines stay here year round. Let’s look at who migrates and who doesn’t with a focus on peregrines in the Americas.
Migratory peregrines
Peregrines eat birds for a living so they have to leave when their food source flies away on migration. In fact peregrines fly with their food because they can catch and eat birds in the air!
North America’s arctic peregrines all leave within a week of the autumnal equinox (22 September this year). In late October 2008 an immature arctic peregrine was passing through Pittsburgh when he got stuck on a balcony. October is when arctic peregrines pass over Pittsburgh, considering when they leave home. Read about his rescue here.
Juvenile arctic Peregrine Falcon found in downtown Pittsburgh, late October 2008 (photo by Todd Katzner)
Here are some of the birds he would have eaten on the breeding grounds — American pipit, northern pintail and lapland longspur. These also leave at the autumnal equinox.
American pipit, Algonquin Provincial Park, Canada (photo from Wikimedia Commons)Northern pintails (photo by Alan Schmierer via Wikimedia Commons, Creative Commons license)Lapland longspur (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
The slideshow below dramatically illustrates how quickly arctic peregrines leave on migration. The dark purple blob in Arctic Canada in the week of 20 September is gone by the next week. They are on their way to South America.
Peregrine falcons find a lot to eat in North American cities year round. Pigeons are resident and there’s an influx of migratory starlings in winter.
Pigeons in flight (photo from Wikimedia Commons)Winter flock of starlings in Newark, Ohio (photo from Wikimedia Commons)
Peregrines are present in eastern North America cities during the shortest days of the year — the week of the winter solstice 20 December. This map indicates they are concentrated at the coast (purple) with a scattering of inland hotspots. The coastal sites include migratory peregrines and wandering immature birds. The inland purple dots are non-migratory peregrines.
Peregrine abundance in eastern North America on the winter solstice, week of Dec 20 (map from eBird Status and Trends)
Pittsburgh Peregrine Fans, notice how Pittsburgh is a dark purple dot on the map in December. Those are reports of our resident peregrines. Good work, eBirders!
Watch as peregrine abundance ebbs and flows across the globe. Some of the purple blobs in the Southern Hemisphere are fascinating.
This week I discovered a BirdCast blog from 31 July that lists Peak Fall Migration Windows for 1000 US Cities. The date ranges are “seasonal windows during which 50% of total nocturnal bird migration traffic historically passes through each city based on radar measurements from the last two and a half decades.” This peak is not just warblers. It’s bird bodies passing overhead including thrushes, blackbirds and sparrows.
Of course I looked up Pittsburgh. Our peak is 9/15/2025 through 10/11/2025.
(Thumbnail shown here; click on it to see full size)
But no such map exists for fall migration so I mapped it myself using peak start dates on a city lights satellite map. After all, most birds are migrating at night. Once peak migration starts it lasts 3 to 4.5 weeks. My colors are Yellow–>Orange = August, Green–>Blue = September, Purple = October.
As you can see peak fall migration times are all over the map, sometimes the reverse of our north-to-south expectations.
The first peaks are in Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Wyoming in the second half of August (yellow is earlier than orange on the map above). Weirdly the peak in Phoenix (yellow) is earlier than the peak in Denver (orange).
Pacific coast migration looks normal from Seattle to San Francisco but Los Angeles has its peak *before* those northern cities.
In Texas, Houston peaks two weeks before Dallas. Hmmm.
Migration looks like a rolling wave north to south as expected (green-to-dark-blue) in the area from the Mississippi to the Appalachians.
But the East Coast from Massachusetts to Virginia Beach peaks in early *October*!
Maybe that’s why BirdCast did not create a map.
Meanwhile Pittsburgh is not at peak migration yet but the species pictured above are at their own peak in our region: Canada warbler, olive-sided flycatcher, eastern wood-pewee and ruby-throated hummingbird. To find the peaks by species see The Return of Migration Tools at BirdCast.
