Last week, against all common sense, my wife and I packed up the kids and our barky Adventure Chihuahua, Timmy, and went camping. The main reason, other than temporary insanity, was that a renter was in our house and we had run out of family who would take us in. So off we went to Nickerson State Park. We all actually love camping, even Timmy, and had our usual swell time at Nickerson. We were even treated to daily visits from some extremely friendly airborne wildlife who were not birds, but more on that later.
We do love camping, but let’s face it, it’s a crap shoot. When it comes to living together in a small tent, you’re one rainy week away from couples therapy. Thankfully we were treated to perfect camping weather – dry, calm, and warm, not hot. And though we were ten minutes from home, with the big-woods aesthetic of Nickerson and a little squinting you can convince yourself you drove five hours to the middle of Maine.
But boy were the birds quiet – it was clear that breeding season was over. Hours would go by with nothing but the same Blue Jay family making the rounds for camp scraps. I rarely heard chickadees or titmice and managed just 29 species over six days. Brown Creepers, a personal favorite, called most days – many don’t know they breed around here. I enjoyed the calls of what was likely a family of young screech owls the first night and saw another fly across a road. But my highlight bird came on night three.
As I sat in that meditative state only a campfire brings, something off in the dark barked the following question: “who cooks for you, who cooks for you-all?” It was of course a Barred Owl, a species established on the Upper Cape for 15 years, but still a rare novelty east of Barnstable. Now I really felt like we were in Maine. This owl called for several minutes, but I never heard a response. The owl later woke me at 3:30 AM, at which point it was finally answered by a second – I felt happy for it as I drifted back to sleep.
The owls were great, but it was a different nocturnal creature that ultimately stole the show. Each night around 8:30, adorable little pirates descended upon the campsites in our section – Flying Squirrels. In all my years of camping and doing field work around the US I never knew that flying squirrels could be camp scavengers. They would glide from a tall tree down to one next to our picnic table, sometimes whizzing so close to my head I felt the wind. They scurried across the table and the camp stove. One climbed my leg. From the tree trunks they implored us for scraps, flashing those big doe eyes and soft, baggy fur, and some friends we had visiting couldn’t resist. Even I, scolding wildlife biologist, succumbed to their furry charms - I left a small hazelnut I had picked from a nearby shrub in a crag of their favorite tree, and the offering was quickly claimed.
Though we felt far from the typical tourist’s impression of Cape Cod, the big-woods illusion of Nickerson only went so far. Roseate Terns, federally endangered, oceanic birds, called as they flew over the campsite en route from bay to ocean. Salt water was just two-and-a-half miles away, after all. Black-bellied Plovers, birds of wide-open tundra and mud flats with no use whatsoever for trees, also passed over, revealed by their undulating, whistled call. It was the best of two worlds – smoky, woodsy, take-a-dip-in-the-pond camping, plus, somewhere above the trees, a little taste of the world-class beach birding that brings all the birders to our yard.
So get out there and do some close-to-home camping if you can – it may not seem exotic enough for the effort, but it’s a way to more intimately know the place you live. But take it from me, make sure to bring something for the flying squirrels – one night we ran out of nuts and they took Timmy the Adventure Chihuahua hostage.
