October can be a great time for birding in the national parks...at least those in the East, where you might spot a Golden-crowned Kinglet/Kirby Adams

If “October” and “travel” are in the same story, odds are good that it’s an article about the best places to see fall foliage. Of course, to those of us with birds perpetually on the brain, October is the conclusion of fall migrant season. With that in mind, I got to wondering about the best national park to maximize migrant-watching and leaf-peeping in one trip.

The national parks most renowned for their fall foliage are probably Rocky Mountain, Great Smoky, Shenandoah, Acadia, and the Blue Ridge Parkway. Peak leaf color varies from year-to-year, but in all of those Eastern parks the second week of October is a pretty safe bet to get great looks at reds, oranges, and yellows. The famed golden time in Colorado tends be a bit earlier.

The aspens turn Rocky Mountain National Park to gold in late September, but that’s not peak birding time at the high elevations. It does coincide nicely with elk bugling season, but since this is about birds, the park gets no credit for elk. The best migrant songbirds move out just ahead of the color change, so we’ll move on to the Eastern parks.

A majority of the warblers have skipped town in Maine by mid-October, as well. This is a great time to check out waterfowl off the coast of Mount Desert Island, but the summer resident colorful birds, except for a few stragglers, won’t be found amidst the vibrant leaves. Acadia is still a great birding spot in October, but migration just doesn’t line up perfectly with the leaves.

The popular foliage routes of the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive through Shenandoah will still be hosting some warblers and other migrant songbirds into mid-October, but at those higher elevations many birds have already left or are moving down-slope. Hawk watching is fabulous along the ridgelines during fall migration, but we’re talking about the colorful little birds that dance among the leaves, so those parks can’t get credit for raptor migration in this contest.

Yellow-bellied sapsuckers are another bird to watch for in the fall/Kirby Adams

That leaves Great Smoky Mountain National Park as my choice for the best confluence of fall foliage and fall birds. Warblers are still numerous at lower elevations, making both leaf- and bird-watching excellent from spots like Cade’s Cove. Some birds in the park spend the winter in the cove after summering just a few miles away at higher elevation. Red-breasted Nuthatches, Winter Wrens, and Yellow-rumped Warblers all make that very short migration in October. It’s also the time of year that northern migrants arrive to spend the winter in the valleys of Great Smoky. Many Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers find the sheltered Cade’s Cove to be a much better place to spend October than central Ontario.

One interesting thing that caught my attention while looking into this question is that none of these Appalachian parks tend to be very well-birded in October, at least not if reports to eBird are any indication. Is that because everyone’s too busy looking at leaves to bother with birds? Or perhaps the birders aren’t fond of the crowds and traffic jams that accompany peak color in the Appalachian parks and Acadia.  I know some birding friends who visited Rocky Mountain a couple weeks ago and were deterred from birding some of the best sites thanks to elk jams and aspen jams.

Have any of you travelers tried to maximize leaf-peeping and wildlife watching? What’s the best park to pull off that trick, in your opinion?