Note that all 3 do not always agree, and Weather Underground may be more accurate, due to the use of more weather stations. Second, check various long-term forecasts, to identify potentially good conditions in the future-look for low pressure systems and rain/storms heading for the Gulf Coast.įor example, check the 10-day forecasts for Gulfport, MS on, National Weather Service, and Weather Underground. Read any recent posts by Bob Duncan predicting birding conditions for northwest Florida and coastal Alabama on ALBIRDS: id=88

However, if you’re not trying to run a Big Day, then you can optionally try to bird on a fallout day itself, and you might have a broader time window (earlier in April, and into early May).įirst check other people’s migration forecasts: For Big Day planning, the minimum goal should be avoiding really terrible conditions (e.g., running a Big Day after one or more sustained days of sun and south winds during which most of the migrants have departed), even if we don’t achieve perfect conditions, and targeting a time window in approximately the last two weeks of April, for maximum diversity.

If that is our goal, after a fallout we want overnight north winds & light rain to keep migrants grounded near the coast, followed by a day of good weather for birding, with some sun to get raptors up. Our original goal in creating this protocol was to aid in running a Big Day attempt on the day after a fallout, so we wanted to predict decent fallout conditions on a particular day, and then we wanted decent weather for birding the next day. During that time, many migratory songbirds launch from the Yucatan peninsula in the evening, fly north overnight, and reach the Gulf Coast sometime the next day, often mid- to late-morning. Overview: This protocol was written to guide prediction of migratory bird fallout conditions on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during spring migration.

Fallout west coast map