ON WING: What makes a bird decide to head north in the spring?
How do they find their way? And how, as impossible as it seems, do
they manage to return to the same neighborhood – sometimes, the
same tree – year after year?

Thanks to Joe Kosack, wildlife conservation education specialist
for the Pennsylvania Game Commission, we may be able to answer some
of those questions.

He writes, in “Winging it Northward,” that roughly two dozen
species of waterfowl come through Pennsylvania during spring
migration and they’re always popping into and out of rest areas
that meet their varied nutritional needs, offer seclusion, and
provide safety through either vegetative cover or sprawling areas
of big water.

Every spring, North America’s wintering waterfowl head north to
breed and nest in a spectacular migration of short duration that
many people miss because they’re still spending most of their free
time indoors.

“Waterfowl species are easier to see than migrating songbirds
that flit through the forest canopy or birds of prey that fly a
half-mile above you. Migrating waterfowl are found resting or
foraging in areas where there’s open water and limited
disturbances,” according to John Dunn, commission biologist.

As they pass through Pennsylvania, waterfowl use the Atlantic
Flyway, one of four migratory corridors that ducks, geese and swans
follow in North America. All migrations – north in spring, south in
fall – correspond with changing seasons and the availability of
open water.

Birds head north to nest and south to winter in open water.

After spring migrants funnel through the Chesapeake Bay and
Delaware Bay on the Atlantic Flyway, their routes branch out across
Pennsylvania’s breadth and up through New Jersey along the coast in
an ever-widening pattern.

Those individualized migratory highways take them by historic
stopovers that have long provided food and refuge, and, ultimately,
to the body of water or waterway where they were hatched and grew
up. They typically use the same route, year after year.

“Pennsylvania is a pretty important stopover between the
Chesapeake Bay and the Great Lakes for migrating waterfowl,” Dunn
explained.

Although we don’t have a destination as magnetic as a Chesapeake
Bay, the state does offer more than 50,000 miles of waterways, two
glaciated wetland regions, and a substantial number of big lakes,
impoundments and marshes. In addition, the state has an abundance
of agricultural lands that surround the state’s diverse water
resources.