A Narrow Window South: The Brant Passage of Late October

By Chuck Hennet — November 2, 2025

Between October 21 and 30, the Davidson Farm Bird Monitor recorded a brief, concentrated movement of Brant, the small Arctic goose known for its tight coastal migration route. Early detections were negligible—just seven low-confidence calls on October 21—but by the 29th the system logged 67 events, rising to 233 on October 30 with confidence scores peaking at 0.73. These were the only Brant detections since the Bird Monitor began recording in June 2025, a pattern too distinct and temporally focused to be dismissed as background noise or false positives. The data don’t suggest that Brant were present at the farm itself, but rather that the system was sensitive enough to register their calls as flocks passed high overhead—a faint trace of a long-distance movement unfolding invisibly in the night sky.

At the same time, coastal eBird data from Sandy Hook, New Jersey showed hundreds of Brant passing between October 27 and 31 before tapering off in early November. The inland detections align almost perfectly with that surge, suggesting that some portion of those coastal flocks cut briefly west of their usual route—audible for only a night or two as they crossed the ridge. For a species whose migration is typically confined to the Atlantic edge, this short inland echo stands as rare acoustic evidence of the broader movement of fall.