The last couple days have featured a noticeable influx of Yellow rumped Warblers (as expected for early October) but this morning was truly impressive. Yesterday I spent a few hours at Arcadia and noticed quite a few had arrived with a total of 50+. I then made a brief late morning stop in the East Meadows mainly looking for shorebirds and noticed many Yellow rumped Warblers both in the cornfields and in the air. On yet another foggy and cool morning I headed back over to the East Meadows to both look for a Nelson's Sparrow that was seen a few days before and to try to get a better count of the warblers. Not long after I arrived I started seeing and hearing Yellow rumped Warblers and they continued until I left. It appeared that many of the birds were roosting in the large tracts of corn and heading mainly off after dawn while others appeared to be feeding both in the cornfields and in any nearby weedy area. I had a total of at least 178 individuals which is my fourth highest count for the species I have ever had in the county. I covered just a very small portion of the meadows and I'm sure the total number of Yellow rumped Warblers was many times the total I had. My top three previous days in the county for the species included a count of 188 on May 1st of this year, a count of 243 on October 14th last year and the biggest count of all of a whopping 944+ at Quabbin Park on October 19, 2005 following a unique set of circumstances that grounded large numbers of birds (the passage of a series of showers before dawn while numbers of birds were migrating).
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