Migration of Birds (1979)Lincoln, Frederick Charles
Science
Migration of Birds (1979)
Lincoln, Frederick Charles
Birds; Birds -- Migration
Nevertheless, these regular northward movements are quite striking,
especially in herons. The young of some species commonly wander
late in the summer and fall for several hundred miles north of the
district in which they were hatched. Young little blue herons as well
as great and snowy egrets are conspicuous in the East as far north
as New England and in the Mississippi Valley to southeastern Kansas
and Illinois. Black-crowned night herons banded in a large colony
at Barnstable, Massachusetts, have been recaptured the same season
northward to Maine and Quebec and westward to New York. In September
most of them return to the south.
These movements have been noted in several other species as well.
Broley (1947) nicely illustrated this northward movement of bald
eagles along the Atlantic coast (Fig. 29). Birds banded as nestlings
in Florida have been retaken that summer 1,500 miles away in Canada.
Van Tyne and Berger (1959) surmised the summer heat of Florida was
too great for this eagle, a northern species that has only recently
spread into Florida to take advantage of abundant food and nesting
sites, which it exploits during the cooler season. Postbreeding
northward movements are also shared by wood ducks, yellow-breasted
chats, eastern bluebirds, and white pelicans.
A somewhat different type of postbreeding migration is the so-called
"molt migration" exhibited by many species of waterfowl (Salomonsen
1968). These birds may travel considerable distances away from their
nesting area to traditional molting sites where they spend the
flightless period of the eclipse plumage. At such times they may move
well into the breeding ranges of other geographic races of their
species. These movements may be governed by the availability of food
and are counteracted in fall by a directive migratory impulse that
carries those birds that attained more northern latitudes after the
nesting period, back to their normal wintering homes in the south.
Vagrant Migration
The occasional great invasions beyond the limits of their normal
range of certain birds associated with the far North are quite
different from migration patterns discussed previously. Classic
examples of such invasions in the eastern part of the country are
the periodic flights of crossbills. Sometimes these migrations will
extend well south into the southern States.
[Illustration: _Figure 29. Northern recoveries of young bald eagles
banded as nestlings in Florida. The birds sometimes "migrate" over
1,500 miles up the coast during their first summer before returning
south (From Broley 1947)._]
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