Author: Cara Giaimo / Source: Atlas Obscura
Songbirds fly all night because it’s what they do. Take the Cape May warbler, for example. Every spring, the fist-sized, yellow-and-brown bird takes a trip from the West Indies to the boreal forests of Canada, where it nests, breeds, and feasts on spruce budworms.
The journey is nearly 3,000 miles long, and is mostly nocturnal, so that the birds can avoid predators.Humans, on the other hand, generally only travel all night when they’ve got something to see. Take Ian Davies, for example. This past Friday, May 25, 2018, Davies drove from his hometown of Ithaca, New York, to Tadoussac, Quebec, a journey of 600 miles. He and his friends—dedicated birdwatchers all—were hoping to see the warblers.
The weekend was a bust, bird-wise. But on Monday, as morning rain showers began to lift, warblers started flickering past in groups of about a dozen. Around 6:30 a.m., the rain stopped, and, as Davies later wrote, “things were never the same.” The trickle of birds became a torrent. “Solid streams of warblers were moving through: below eye level, over the river, over the trees,” says Davies. At times, more than a thousand birds flew by per minute.
“In our wildest dreams,” Davies says, he and his companions had hoped for maybe a 50,000-bird day. Instead, they found themselves smack in the middle of a group about 10 times that size—one that experts are now calling the biggest North American warbler migration in recorded history. There was nothing to do but hold onto their binoculars and keep counting.
Tadoussac is a small town north of Quebec City, at the junction of two rivers, the St. Lawrence and the Saguenay. Birders may go there on purpose, but most warblers actually find it by accident, waylaid while winging from their winter habitats in Central and South America up to their forest breeding grounds. “Warblers want to come back to the same area where they bred last year,” explains Pascal Côté, the director of the Tadoussac Bird Observatory—but they’re so exhausted from their journeys, many overshoot their intended destinations, like sleepy…
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