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Index of Subjects At 3:40 AM -0300 8/24/09, Sherman Williams wrote: >I would be interested in hearing if those of you who have been >keeping a close watch on the shorebird numbers, are seeing a drop >in numbers beginning tomorrow, Monday (Aug 24). Late Sunday >evening (Aug 23) and until about 2 am (Aug 24) the sky over Horton >Bluff was filled with waves of the piping-twittery sounds of >high-flying shorebirds, all heading southeast. Hello Sherman, As numbers of the early-arriving shorebirds had remained very high later than usual (c. 100,000 roosting on Mary's Point beach, NB, last Wednesday and Thursday) I had been expecting a major departure of the early shorebirds as soon as there was a change to cooler weather, and your observations indicate that that happened on Sunday night. Here, we did not note waves of birds passing over but there was continual calling overhead (the sky was clear) between 10 p.m. and midnight, perhaps flocks getting organized for departure. (In the past, sometimes in the evening, we have witnessed large flocks of shorebirds fly higher and higher and disappear towards Nova Scotia.) Because the usual roosting areas here were completely covered at high tide Friday through Monday it is not easy to judge the trend in numbers the past few days, but last evening there were about 15,000 to 20,000 feeding on the mud flats south of the point, which is less than half what I probably would have seen in similar conditions last week. Thanks for sharing your observations of the passage overhead. David -- David Christie Mary's Point, Harvey, Albert Co., New Brunswick, Canada http://www3.nbnet.nb.ca/maryspt
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