Nature Moncton Nature News: September 8 2025

NATURE MONCTON NATURE NEWS

September 8, 2025

Nature Moncton members as well as any naturalist in New Brunswick or beyond are invited to share their photos and descriptions of recent nature sightings to build a fresh (almost) daily edition of Nature News

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Proofreading courtesy of Louise Nichols at nicholsl@eastlink.ca

**On Sunday, September 7th, Peter and Deana Gadd paid a visit to Miramichi Marsh. More than 30 wood ducks were present. On this occasion, these ducks did not seem as nervous as usual and stayed around to be admired. Safety in numbers, perhaps. The pond where they are located is covered mainly with watershield (Brasenia schreberi), which they seem to like.

It was noted that they are starting to regain their breeding plumage, some more quickly than others. Even in eclipse, though, the species has some striking colouration.

As well as seeing a number of other bird species, they felt fortunate to see a swamp sparrow that is usually quite elusive in the “swamp". As they left, they were granted a close encounter with a chestnut-sided warbler; unfortunately, it was too busy with basic needs to pose for a portrait.

**The underwing moths tend to do their mating missions as the nights cool. These medium-sized moths are often very drab when perched, but can be very colourful when they show their underwings to frighten off predators such as nature photographers. It is usually effective!

Nelson Poirier had a visit from an ultronia underwing moth that briefly showed a portion of its brilliant red and black banded underwings.

**Delores Basque suggests that the info below may be of great interest to the birding community and strongly suggests reviewing it:

“There is a website under Birdcast.info which is a forecast for birds. There is a lot of interesting information to read for those who are curious about the background of data. It is part of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, like eBird, Merlin, Nestwatch, BOW, etc.

The quickest way to get information -- on the top or right-hand side, go to 'Migration tools'

4 TOOLS:

-FORECAST: Actual day plus next 2-day maps. It is a map prediction at 3 hours after sunset. If you want to know if tomorrow is a good birding day, you have to check this evening (today’s) date. Also called “Night of” (insert today’s date). We can see that the night of Sept 8th will have High migration for Maine. So Tuesday the 9th should be a very good morning and day to go birding.

-LIVE MIGRATION: 24 hr data, up to the last 20 minutes. Plus, historical data. On the map, the day starts at 6 pm and continues the following day.

-ALERTS: Mostly US cities. Some Canadian cities -- St Andrews and St Stephen.

-DASHBOARD: US radar and data. Useful information from Maine or its 2 Canadian border counties: Aroostook County and Washington County.”