Hello Birders,

I just got off the phone with Mark Shieldcastle, research director of Black Swamp Bird Observatory. We've both been looking at weather maps, trying to understand this year's excellent but odd migration in northwest Ohio, and trying to predict what will happen next. It appears that the next two days, Thursday May 12 and Friday May 13, should be very good for a big arrival of warblers and other neotropical migrants at Magee Marsh, Ottawa National Wildlife Refuge, and other migration hotspots along the Lake Erie shoreline.

Conditions are such that Friday is almost a guarantee for a lot of birds. Thursday is a little less certain. It should have more birds than today (which is already quite a lot) but it might turn out to be even bigger than this Friday will be. Mark points out that there's sometimes a phenomenon of birds ballooning out ahead of an arriving front -- this is apparently what happened on the big day last Friday, May 6. Some of this will depend on what happens on a very local level during the predawn hours, and that's impossible to predict with precision. But it appears that there are large numbers of second-wave migrants fairly close to the south of us, and they'll be arriving here soon. The second wave is the one with the greatest diversity, so even if total numbers fall short of predictions, there should be a great variety of warblers and other birds around.

If you can't get out until the weekend, don't despair: the weather is going to turn cooler after Friday, so birds that come in during the next two days should stick around for a while. But if you have the flexibility to get out, it appears that Thursday May 12 and Friday May 13 (perhaps especially the latter) may turn out to be memorable days in the migrant traps along Lake Erie in northwest Ohio.

As usual, for more information on birding this area, you can check out
http://www.bsbo.org/Birding/
or
http://cranecreekbirding.blogspot.com/

See you out there --

Kenn Kaufman
Editor, Kaufman Field Guides series
http://www.kaufmanfieldguides.com/
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