I finally have a little time to watch birds each day, and it’s all thanks to the Monomoy School District. Between my kindergarten-aged son’s absurdly early bus time of 6:52 AM and the time we have to get my daughter up for pre-school, I have one deliciously unstructured hour.

Hurricane, then Tropical Storm, then “Post-Tropical Cyclone” Lee has come and gone. Lee barely grazed us with some ho-hum 50 mph gusts that downed a few trees, having passed well to our east. But how did it score in storm-birding terms?

Birders are all secretly hoping Lee comes, and that Lee is bringing lots of gifts in the form of rare, storm-blown birds.

Hundreds of thousands of shorebirds and seabirds breed, feed, and rest on Chatham’s barrier beaches. Importantly for these ISS surveys, thousands of normally kinetic shorebirds take a break from feeding to rest in certain parts of Monomoy during the high tide, at which point they are relatively easy to count.

Fall migration is an Irish goodbye – by the time you notice you’re not hearing the catbirds anymore, they’ve been gone two weeks.

The Lesser Sand-Plover, that enigmatic Asian visitor who brought birders from at least as far away as Canada, was ominously absent from South Cape Beach in Mashpee after 8 AM yesterday.

Rhode Island is no slouch in the rare bird game - places like the Charlestown Breachway, Napatree Point, and Block Island have produced many a rarity that sent Massachusetts birders speeding down I-95.

I highly recommend paying attention to the bees visiting your yard. Just like with birding, you never know what you may find. Some tiny bees I noticed visiting male winterberry at Wellfleet Bay sanctuary last month turned out to be armored resin bees, a group never before recorded on the Cape and Islands.

As we round the corner of mid-summer, with Labor Day now dimly visible at the horizon, it’s time you got serious about shorebirds.

The bird was indeed a plover, but not the one they were tasked with watching. This was a Mountain Plover, a scarce species of the high, dry plains east of the rockies, and one that eluded me thus far in my birding career.