Ah, back to school time. I remember those melancholy end of summer days back in 1980s Brockton, the trips to Bradlees or Zayre’s to pick up some back-to-school clothes and maybe a new Trapper Keeper. A new pair of parachute pants and some Etonic sneakers and I was good to go! But it’s not just back to school time for kids, all those billions of young birds that hatched over the spring and summer need to learn how to be birds, and it’s a real school of hard knocks, let me tell you. Case in point, a couple of super rare young birds that missed their bus stop by more than a thousand miles this past week.
First, there was the wayward Wood Stork. This young bird turned up in a recently cleared area within the Herring River restoration project in Wellfleet, representing just the third ever record for the Cape. It missed the stop for its school by anywhere from 800 to several thousand miles, depending on where it came from – they breed from South Carolina to Argentina. But most of us see them when we visit Florida, where this federally Threatened species can be seen feeding on fish in roadside ditches.
They eat mostly fish, but like most wading birds they eat anything they can fit down their gullet, including birds, mammals, and small alligators. Along with “where do I live”, the first thing youngsters need to learn is how to eat – a study in Georgia showed that young Wood Storks spent more time feeding and were less successful finding fish than adults, as you would expect unless you’ve never been around anything young.
Our next youngster that better get itself to school is the Lark Bunting that turned up at a feeder in Norton, a bit outside our normal listening area but still in Bristol County. Despite the name, it’s a sparrow more closely related to our backyard Song Sparrows than it is to Indigo Buntings. This is the first Lark Bunting ever seen in the county, which is at least 1500 miles east of where this bird should be right now. They nest in dry grasslands no closer than South Dakota and winter from Central Texas to Mexico. You have about zero chance of hearing one in Massachusetts, and I doubt you’ll be hitting the dry western prairies in summer anytime soon, but they have a great song, so here it is: https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/20761571
This is a good reminder to get your feeders up if you gave them a break for the summer like I did – I just put some seed out this past weekend for the first time in a while. You never know when a first county or even state record bird might just plop down in your yard. Migratory birds are starting their big movements in late August, so the potential is high for some naïve youth to overshoot by a thousand miles or two and end up in your birdbath.
There was chatter that someone saw the famous flamingo flying by a spot in Marion on Monday but that has not been confirmed. The bird, which has famously visited Chapin Beach in Dennis twice, had been holed up in Rhode Island since mid-July, within our listening area and just spitting distance from the Massachusetts border. It hasn’t been seen since August 12, but maybe it will turn up again – Chapin Beach, which it visited in early June and again in mid-July, is obviously worth a peek.
So, as you head out to Zayres or maybe Caldor this week to pick up some acid washed jeans, a flamingo-pink blazer, or stirrup pants for back to school, keep those eyes peeled for the wayward back-to-school birds of late summer.
