Annual Avian Migration
Living in Place
Every fall, even people who aren’t birders make the annual pilgrimage to the top of Putney Mountain, where they watch the charismatic avifauna migrate south along the West and Connecticut River flyways. Up there, a group of regulars keep count of the red tails, kestrels, sharpies, and bald eagles that wing south.
They even count the blue jays. While many jays winter in Vermont, as many as two hundred a day head for the beach at about the same time the leaf peepers who came for the foliage return south.
Birds of lesser fame also flock up, flying back and forth in dizzying practice formations, all winging one way, then another, the low slung sun glancing off their wings. Other backyard birds – those colorful finches and elusive warblers and iridescent bluebirds – hop from bush to bush like undercover agents, as if ashamed of their impulse to high tail it out of here before the cold clamps down. Or maybe they just don’t want to compete with the winter-hardy cardinals, whose males flame against the snow in winter, while the pert females wear buff feathers tailored like a Coco Chanel suit.
These are all well-known and well-documented migratory parades, the bittersweet harbingers of November, when the earth goes bare and the sun dark, and those of us without feathers hunker down until the snow arrives to cheer us up. But there’s a lesser-known avian migration that occurs each fall at my house.
By the light of the aptly named Blood Moon, we went out with headlamps, and moved the pullets from their field house into the chicken coop, where they joined the flock of established layers.
We deliberately time this migration to take place at night. If the new laying hens are introduced to the established birds in daylight, the older girls will peck newcomers mercilessly—sometimes to death. But if the new birds enter the coop in the dark of night, the established birds don’t recognize them as strangers in the morning.
Our other flock—the thirty birds that arrive as day old chicks and grow for 6-8 weeks on pasture—that flock had already reached table weight and migrated to the freezer weeks ago.
