ML42064921

Age

Not specified

Sex

Not specified

Tags

Multiple species

Observation details

Noting the north winds and peak time of year, we headed to Boiler Bay hoping for a good shorebird day and were not disappointed. Spectacular, with waves of peeps flying northward in large flocks. Numbers were so impressive that I resorted to counting how many flocks flew past. I tallied just over eleven hundred large flocks (200-300+ birds, some flocks up to 2000+) and many smaller groups. Clearly hundreds of thousands had migrated past. The movement gradually moved further offshore, but I was still tallying endless flocks of two to three hundred peeps until we left. At times many thousand would pass close by in only a few minutes. Our final estimate was 330,000 but we rounded down slightly. I think this number is conservative, as it was easy to underestimate flock sizes, and we were often missing flocks when our focus turned to something else.

Technical information

Model

Canon PowerShot SX20 IS

ISO

125

Focal length

100 mm

Flash

Flash did not fire, auto

f-stop

f/5.7

Shutter speed

1/320 sec

Dimensions

4000 pixels x 1474 pixels

Original file size

2.48 MB