Hooded Warbler. Photo by Jeff Bryant.
By Olivia Moline, CCAS Field Trip Chair
This month has been a pleasant surprise full of fantastic weather and birds. We had a Hooded Warbler that stopped over in Urbana, a little late for his scheduled migration, but we were excited to see him nonetheless.
Hooded Warblers tend to be just slightly ahead of the middle of fall migration (September 23 marks the middle of fall migration) at around the second or third week of September. However, the male Hooded Warbler that was spotted by Mason Maron, our wonderful community member and student, was located in Urbana on September 31 and left on October 1.
So far this year, according to BirdCast (run by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology in connection with UIUC, Purdue, and the University of Massachusetts Amhurst), Champaign County’s bird migrants have been a bit on the early side. But this does not mean that we are less excited to see birds we are not expecting for this time of year.
Happy birding!
