I had stayed home from school on May 2 because I had to work on a project in school that I left until the last minute. It was due May 3 and so I started at noon on May 2nd and worked. It was a stop motion project with clay so it was bound to take a long time. The sky got darker and I still had a lot of work to do. I decided I was going to need some coffee if I was going to finish this project. I worked into the night and around midnight I needed some fresh air so I stepped outside to wake up a bit.
The weather was nice with 100% cloud cover and no wind. It was fairly warm out too, about 15 degrees. There was a very light drizzle that probably helped keep the birds lower.
That's when I heard the first thrush. I could only pick out Veery and Hermit Thrush calls because I hadn't studied flight calls a lot. I heard hundreds of passerine chip notes as they flew over as well. I was genuinely stunned. I always knew NFC's (Nocturnal Flight Calls) existed, but nothing could've prepared me for that.
I also heard some things I could actually identify including several Wilson's Snipes doing their winnowing calls. This was awesome considering I had never heard these calls before and they were so easily identifiable. I also managed to hear some yellowlegs which I never would've thought I would hear as an NFC but there they were.
The entire experience was very surreal considering I was quite sleep deprived and running almost entirely on coffee and adrenaline. I stepped out several times through the night between work periods.
I managed to finish my project at about 6:30am and I got 45 minutes of sleep that night... I got a 100% on the project though :)
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