A few years back, I drove to Davis and went into Stumptown Ales to meet with Dylan Jones, the editor of Highland Outdoors magazine. We had connected a few weeks prior and were discussing me contributing articles about birds and birding in West Virginia. At that point, I had written for various birding magazines, but hadn’t had the chance to write about birding in general outdoors publications or West Virginia-specific ones.
This week, my newest article launched online after being published in the fall edition: The Great Migration, all about fall bird migration in West Virginia (with a shoutout to butterfly migration, too!).
Read the Article »
The Great Migration: Fall Bird Migration in WV
Bird migration is truly a miracle and a mystery alike, and there is still so much that humans don’t know about how or why birds make journeys of thousands and thousands of miles each year.
For instance, look at this Bar-tailed Godwit that has a tiny location tracker on it:
If a twice-annual journey from northern Siberia to New Zealand isn’t incredible enough in itself, there’s the fact that they are flying for eight or more days without stopping. Can you imagine?
A really important consideration of these migrations is that to keep populations of birds from declining, we must protect all of the lands that these birds use — breeding grounds, migration stopover sites, and wintering grounds. For some species, even the best conservation measures within the United States only protect their homes for a few months of the year.
Organizations like BirdsCaribbean conserve winter habitats for many breeding birds in the United States like the American Redstart, a charismatic warbler that is common in West Virginia’s woods in the summer and winters throughout the Caribbean and Central America:
If you’re curious about BirdsCaribbean, you can check out their site or watch this short presentation by my friend Holly in The Birding Co-op’s online community.
As I said in my article in Highland Outdoors, I dearly love fall migration, especially in West Virginia. This year I’ve had some especially fun outings finding Connecticut Warbler and Nelson’s Sparrow, two hard-to-find species that take lots of searching and luck to speak out. More on those outings to come in future posts!
