This week’s Bird Report has us at busy Craigville Beach, Barnstable, in high season. While not a typical stop on a visiting birder’s itinerary, a most improbable bird there has drawn the attention of the birding community well beyond Cape Cod, and even beyond Massachusetts. It was found and identified by Mass Audubon plover monitors Natalie Donofrio and Jory Teltser, granting them instant rock star status, at least in birding circles. 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.
It’s hard to overstate the improbability of this bird turning up where it did. Even in the unlikely event a Mountain Plover made it to Massachusetts, based on their habitat affinities back home, I would think it would most likely disappear into some grassy airport or farm field, or maybe the moors of Monomoy, where no one would ever find it, a little beige bird in a big beige world. The vast majority of Mountain Plovers live their entire lives never seeing salt water or even a beach – even the ones that winter in coastal Texas are on ploughed farm fields or turf farms, not the beach. But here this bird is, walking tamely around among the strolling tourists, at a time when it should be on some dusty, overgrazed prairie in Eastern Colorado walking among the pronghorn antelopes and prairie dogs.
Yet this elegant, arid land plover seemed very at home on this beach. With its beigeish, tannish, buffish plumage, I found it to be even better camouflaged than a Piping Plover against moist beach sand. And from my photos and those of others, it’s feeding well on some combination of insect larvae from the seaweed wrack and juicy mole crabs from the wave swash zone. It keeps to a short stretch of beach with no Piping Plovers, who I suspect would chase it away – the only other bird I saw in the area was an unfortunate Willet with a missing foot. Maybe the two of them roost together each night and commiserate about being different.
The last Mountain Plover to visit Cape Cod was found in Chatham back in October of 1916. Those were trigger-happy times, so that bird was shot by a person listed in the ornithological records as A. E. Crowell, presumably, this was the famous bird carver and market gunner from East Harwich. Lest you judge, while today’s motto for rare birds is “photos or it didn’t happen,” back then it was “specimen or it didn’t happen.” This isn’t just the second record for the state, it's the second record for the entire northeast north of Virginia, and just the fifth record for the whole east coast, as far as I know.
One of my favorite parts of writing about the latest crazy rare bird is getting to do some deeper research into species I don’t know much about. Mountain Plovers are delightfully odd in so many ways, including the whole shorebird-that-doesn’t go-to-the shore thing. But when it comes to nesting, they really do their own thing. Like Piping Plovers, the males make shallow scrapes on bare ground then present them to the female. Oddly, the female lays eggs in two of them, and the pair incubates both nests simultaneously. This is known in the ornithological literature as “not keeping all of your eggs in one basket.” But the females are not monogamous, so her simultaneous nests might be from two different males. Possibly to help keep all these eggs warm when they have to step away, they, really and actually, add pieces of cow manure and other mammal droppings to their nests.
So how can you bag yourself a Mountain Plover? Lucky for you, it’s still there, as of last evening. Like any cheap year-rounder, I parked somewhere free and walked well over a mile, one way, to get to the bird, but you could also pay to park or go super early and subvert the system. You could also just wait another 107 years for the next one to show up, but that seems risky.
