News from Canada: Earlier this fall, when Ron Pittaway and Jean Iron from
Ontario issued their annual "finch forecast," they predicted that this
winter should produce a decent southward flight of Common Redpolls, Now the
latest reports out of Quebec suggest that it could be a really major
flight. It's too soon to tell how many of the birds will reach Ohio, but a
few have been seen in the Cleveland area already and there could be a lot
more on the way.

The bird observatory at Tadoussac, Quebec, is on the St. Lawrence River
about 150 miles northeast of Quebec City. They conduct counts of migrants
there in fall. Birds coming out of the Arctic turn and move southwestward
along the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, continuing along the
north shore of the wide St. Lawrence River, bringing big concentrations of
birds past the observatory. During the last week or so, Tadoussac has
recorded more than 125,000 Common Redpolls, including counts of more than
33,000 on Tuesday, October 27, and more than 55,000 on Saturday, October
31. The latter figure probably represents a one-day world record. (On each
of these big flight days they identified about 20 Hoary Redpolls, but
pointed out that only a fraction of the total redpoll numbers were close
enough for certain determination, so the actual number of Hoaries could
have been higher.) Although I've had the pleasure of seeing hundreds of
redpolls in a day, I can't wrap my mind around the idea of seeing 55
thousand of them!

Admittedly, Tadoussac is a long way from Ohio: Almost 750 miles northeast
of Cleveland. But these flocks of redpolls were moving toward the
southwest, so if even a small percentage of them keep moving in the same
direction along the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario, we could wind up with a
big (for us) flight of redpolls on the south side of Lake Erie.

Based on what I've seen in past years, I would expect most of the early
redpoll sightings to be flyover flocks, then birds turning up in prime
habitats of brushy fields and woodland edges. When they first arrive out of
the Arctic, redpolls often don't seem to have a search image for bird
feeders, so often they don't seem to discover our feeders until later in
the season - probably following the example of the local goldfinches and
other birds to find this food source. So even if this turns out to be an
epic flight year, it might be a while before we have the opportunity for
really close, detailed studies of these birds. But you might want to
bookmark this fine ID page for later reference: Ron Pittaway and Jean Iron
have put together photos and information on how to identify redpolls down
to the subspecies level, which can be a fun and worthwhile exercise of our
powers of observation. Here's the link:
http://www.jeaniron.ca/2015/redpollsRP.htm

With striking early numbers of Snowy Owls to the northwest of us, and now
huge flights of redpolls to the northeast of us, we could be in for an
interesting winter here in Ohio!

Kenn Kaufman
Oak Harbor, OH

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