Mark Faherty
Mark Faherty writes the Weekly Bird Report.
Mark has been the Science Coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary since August 2007 and has led birding trips for Mass Audubon since 2002. While his current projects involve everything from oysters and horseshoe crabs to bats and butterflies, he has studied primarily bird ecology for the last 20 years, working on research projects in Kenya, Florida, Texas, California, Arizona, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest. He was a counter for the famous River of Raptors hawk watch in Veracruz, Mexico, and has birded Africa, Panama, Belize, and both Eastern and Western Europe. Mark is an emcee and trip leader for multiple birding festivals and leads workshops on birding by ear, eBird, birding apps, and general bird identification. He is past president of the Cape Cod Bird Club and current member of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee.
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While this is the season of Christmas Bird Counts, wherein highly trained hit squads of birders comb all the birdy hotspots and seldom visited back roads of the Cape and beyond, it is not correct to think of one of these counts as a complete census.
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It’s that “most wonderful” time of year when a birder’s fancy turns to Christmas – Bird Counts, that is. This past weekend began the 124th year of National Audubon’s Christmas Bird Count, and the 93rd year of counts here on Cape Cod.
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Where are my birds? When you work in the bird industry, it’s often the most common question you get, right up there with “how do I stop the woodpeckers pecking my house?”
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This, after all, was the 40th anniversary of the Cape Cod Bird Club’s Waterfowl Census, and they would not be denied their ducks.
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That big, lemming-loving Arctic bird has finally been sighted again on Cape Cod. Just in from some tundra breeding ground in northern Canada or Alaska, this fierce and seldom-seen raptor of big, open areas is getting local birders excited for winter, with sightings of different birds in Dennis and Orleans.
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At this turkey-oriented time, I’m here to take your mind off the fact that you have no plans to brine, or spatchcock, or deep fry a turkey in peanut oil, or whatever the gourmet types with endless free time tell us we should be doing to our turkeys.
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I’ve been on enough offshore boat trips in fall that I’ve seen someone with an actual oriole on their baseball cap.
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As so often happens, Facebook brought us word of the latest rare bird. A post in the Cape Cod Birders group on Monday showed clear photos of a hawk that, in the parlance of its native lands, ain’t from around these parts.
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Though we’re back to short-sleeve weather and barely a leaf has reached the ground, I assure you it is indeed late October, which means that All Hallows Eve is upon us.