A few days ago we were out a little after dawn on a nippy November morning, scraping the ice off the car windows as the first rays of sun began illuminating the blue sky. We stopped to warm our hands and glanced up at the sky. There was a white sparkle. We looked more closely and realized that what we were seeing was the bright white underbelly of a high-up common loon migrating south.

When we first moved to Ithaca, in Upstate New York, we took occasional breaks from our graduate studies at Cornell University to go birding. One fall morning in 1989 we were birding at one of our favorite places in the area, Alan Treman State Park, at the very southwestern corner of the narrow, nearly 30-mile long Cayuga Lake. On that November morning we also looked up to see white sparkles in the sky, and in the span of an hour or two we counted hundreds of common loons flying south. In 1991, we wrote a short note about it for the New York State ornithological society’s journal, The Kingbird.

But we weren’t the only ones to notice this phenomenon of migration there in the Ithaca area. Another birder, by the name of Bob Meade (who later moved to Maine), was also enamored with the loon migration over Cayuga Lake. In 1992 he decided to start doing daily counts, getting up in the cold, pre-dawn darkness and standing at a spot on the lakeshore near the town of Trumansburg.

What Bob discovered was amazing!

Over the course of about a month, from mid-November through early December, there were sometimes 10 thousand or more common loons (a few red-throated mixed in) migrating south over the region and on some exceptional days he counted thousands flying over in a few hours. In fact, one November morning he and the other counters tallied over 6,000 passing south! Over time, other birders in the area began joining Bob on his morning loon watches — some mornings it looked like a birder party going on at that little spot along the lakeshore.

These loons were birds that had stopped on Lake Ontario to refuel after a flight south from their Canadian Boreal Forest breeding grounds as freezing lake conditions pushed them farther south. It is thought that the thousands of birds flying over Cayuga Lake were birds that would take off from Lake Ontario before dawn, gain altitude and fly non-stop to Delaware Bay. From there they could refuel again and then disperse up and down the coast to locations where they would spend the winter.

There are some other places where large numbers of loons can be seen in migration including Whitefish Bird Observatory in Michigan and the seawatch station at Avalon, New Jersey (near Cape May). A migration monitoring seawatch has been running in recent years at Schoodic Point in Acadia National Park.

Keep your eyes open in the morning and you, too, may get to marvel at the white sparkle of a common loon migrating high in the blue November sky!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”