The wind shifted overnight from southwest to north-northwest, and by 5:42 a.m. on Saturday, the ninth of May, a dozen people were standing on the Higbee Beach dike in fleece they had not expected to wear.
Cape May Bird Observatory had posted the alert at 9:14 the night before. A cold front pushing through Pennsylvania, clear skies behind it, a moderate tailwind aloft from the north. The conditions for what local birders call a morning flight.
The dike is a low earthen berm that runs roughly north to south along the western edge of Higbee Beach Wildlife Management Area, in Cape May County, New Jersey. It is, by elevation, almost nothing. By position, it is the last terrestrial feature before the Delaware Bay.
Songbirds that have overflown the cape during the night discover the water in early light, turn, and re-cross the dike heading back inland. The result is a horizontal river of small birds at thirty to fifty feet, lit from the east, against a still-dark western sky.
Tom Reed, who has counted Higbee mornings since 2008, was already at the north end of the dike when Margaret and Lin Pruitt arrived from Wilmington. He counted aloud, in numbers the rest of the group transcribed onto small index cards.
Yellow-rumped warbler. Northern parula. Yellow-rumped, three. American redstart, male. Northern waterthrush. Yellow warbler. Yellow-rumped, four more.
By 6:11 a.m. he had logged 312 birds. By 7:00 the number was 1,094. The morning flight count at Higbee runs on the principle that calibration matters more than precision. The same observer, the same dike, the same hour, year after year, produces a comparable number.
Pete Dunne, in his original Higbee notebooks from the early 1980s, used the phrase movement of magnitude to describe mornings like this one. The phrase has stuck. It is meant in contrast to the merely good day.
A Blackburnian warbler dropped into the wax myrtle below the dike and stayed there for forty seconds. A young man from Brooklyn whispered the species, then said the name twice more, as though confirming it for himself.
The wax myrtle along the dike's southern half is critical. It catches arriving songbirds the way a soft net would. Birds that have been on the wing all night drop into it for fruit and shelter. Hawks know this too, and an immature sharp-shinned came through low at 6:34 and scattered everything for forty seconds.
Cape May County has been a documented migration funnel since at least the 1930s, when Witmer Stone published Bird Studies at Old Cape May. Stone's two volumes, published by the Delaware Valley Ornithological Club in 1937, remain the founding text for the region.
What Stone observed in the 1930s, modern radar ornithology has confirmed and refined. The Delaware Bay creates an obligate reorientation event for migrating passerines. Birds funnel south down the New Jersey coast, hit the bay, and either cross at first light or turn back inland. The dike is where the turning is visible.
By 7:30 the count had slowed. Reed wrote the running total on the side of his notebook and turned to the small group, which now included a father and his two daughters from Princeton.
He had counted 3,841 birds in two hours, fourteen species of warbler, six species of thrush. The numbers, he said, were respectable. Not historic. The historic mornings ran past 10,000.
The morning flight at Higbee depends on a precise combination of conditions. A clear night with northwest winds aloft, a passing front, no rain. Most spring mornings produce nothing visible from the dike. The signal-to-noise ratio is part of what makes the good days noticeable.
Lin Pruitt, who had not been to Cape May before, asked Reed if he tired of it. He thought about the question for a long moment and said that he tired of the drive down from Cumberland County, but not of the dike.
By 8:15 the wind had begun to back to the east and the flight had stopped. The wax myrtle still held birds, and the small group dispersed into it on foot, walking the cut paths and stopping for the warblers that had not yet moved on.
An adult male Cape May warbler, the species for which the town is named though it does not breed here, was found in a black cherry at the south end of the area at 8:42. The bird stayed for nearly ten minutes, feeding methodically.
Witmer Stone, in 1937, called the Cape May warbler uncommon at the cape itself. The bird is now seen at the cape in most spring migrations, in small numbers. The species was named here by Alexander Wilson in 1811, from a specimen taken at the Cape May coast by George Ord.
The eBird checklist for the morning was uploaded by Reed at 11:12 a.m. from a coffee shop on Sunset Boulevard. Sixty-four species, with detail counts on the eighteen warbler species recorded.
By the time the group split up for lunch, the wind had swung fully easterly and the temperature had climbed eight degrees. The afternoon would be quiet. The dike, by 11:00, was empty.
These mornings come perhaps eight times in a spring at Cape May, in a good year. In a bad year, four. Most of birding consists of being present for the seven that are not the eighth. The dike teaches that, more than it teaches anything else.
