I plan to visit Quivira National Wildlife Refuge in Kansas this spring. It’s a wonderful place to see migrant shorebirds. I emailed refuge staff to ask about timing. Today, staffer Christine LaRue wrote to say, “Spring migration for shorebirds is already underway. Normally the heavy migration time starts in April, peaks in May, and lasts into June. Right now we are at least two weeks ahead of normal. I don’t know what the snow storm this week will do to this, but right now we have several of our early-migration species on the refuge. Other species are also in early migration.” Two weeks ahead of normal is way, way ahead. (In the photo are migrant shorebirds found in western Minnesota last spring.)

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 7:38 pm and is filed under Bird migration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.