Yesterday I was up in Truro in some old haunts I don’t get to much anymore. Thanks to a speaking gig at the Payomet Performing Arts Center, I got to do some opportunistic birding around the Highland Center, and I was reminded of two things – birding can be excellent right after rain, and the Highland Center is a really weird place.
About 20 years ago I was doing bird surveys for my graduate research all through the Cape Cod National Seashore – I had over 300 survey points from Fort Hill in Eastham to Wood End in Provincetown, and I knew the park, including deep, off-trail areas, as well as anyone. These days I don’t get too many places besides work, home, and assorted children’s birthday parties, so it was nice to get back to one of my favorite back-woods Outer Cape spots.
The Highland Center was once an Air Force Station, and after many years and attempts to reclaim it, it still looks like something from an X-Files episode, like the residents of the base were all beamed up simultaneously while they were in the middle of dinner. The place has now been abandoned twice – after a lot of effort to paint murals, plant butterfly gardens, and create space for artists and non-profits, a couple of years ago the property was barbed-wire fenced and abruptly closed to the public. The excellent and important Payomet venue and an odd colony of pigeons, a rare sight on the Outer Cape, are the only remaining residents.
Despite the neglect, the weedy fields and old buildings, surrounded by dense scrub oak thickets, beach cliffs, and big, relatively unfragmented swathes of oak forest can make for some good birding. A few years ago I found a surprise Grasshopper Sparrow, a bird long-ago extirpated from the Outer Cape, singing in the field during a summer walk for the Highlands Center folks. And yesterday, thanks to that magical pulse of bird song you get when rain ends, kind of like a second dawn, several of my favorite species revealed themselves.
As I was waiting to go on, I noticed an auspicious Indigo Bunting singing its sneakily goldfinch-esque song behind the tent – these electric-blue stunners are hard to find breeding on the Cape except at the edges of the odd gravel pit, landfill, or managed grassland. This may have been a male with no mate given how much he was singing – most songbirds are pretty quiet this time of the summer. Unmated male birds tend to sing all day, like that annoying single guy talking loudly about himself at a bar.
Later, a male Scarlet Tanager chimed in with his buzzy, robin-like song, kind of like a robin with a kazoo. I rarely hear these beyond Brewster, but they seem to be regular breeders in the oak woods beyond the Highlands Center.
Next, a Yellow-billed Cuckoo, always a rare treat to find, joined the chorus, cooing from somewhere off in the woods. I love these birds – everything about them is odd, from their hunched posture and retiring habits to their diet of hairy caterpillars. In years of abundant food thanks to caterpillar or cicada outbreaks, they will sometimes lay eggs in the nests of other birds to maximize reproduction. Lastly, though they look like they’d have trouble flying a few miles with their odd posture and rounded wings, some go as far as Argentina in the winter, much further than most migrant songbirds.
With all of this birding potential, I, uh highly recommend a hike at the Highland Center – there are lots of hiking trails around and beyond the fenced off area. Maybe you can figure out whatever happened to the residents of that creepy old base, with all its broken windows and doors still swinging on hinges. I don’t know, but I suspect, the TRUTH IS OUT THERE.
