Large congregation of birds?

Question

This year in October, I saw a lot of robins, male and female, finches and chickadees, and geese flying south.

Surprisingly I didn't see many juveniles from previous broods. My guess is that juveniles are harder to see.

And the robins were flying above me, looking for worms below me, and most ended up in tall shrubs. The finches stayed in place longer than the robins.

So why this big congregation of birds when it is still going to be relatively warm for most of the fall(which it ended up being)?

I live in ohio where it usually gets down to -4 in January and 90+ during the summer.

Answer 1

So, we typically think about migrating birds as living somewhere (North) and then traveling South for the winter. This way of thinking is actually not accurate according to a number of ornithologists, including many I used to work with/for. Thy suggest that the birds live in the South and migrate North to breed and to avoid overcrowding of Southern locales. (Though see this article that found support for the more often assumed N-to-S direction of migration). If 'South' is in fact their 'home,' then perhaps they will venture there regardless of weather patterns. However, perhaps neither of these thoughts applies to short-range migrators like robins.

Also, many birds migrate during the dark hours of the night, so I wonder if the birds you saw were even migrating, per se, or just moving about regionally.