And just like that it’s after Labor Day. Suddenly it’s a little easier to breathe, to checkout at the grocery store, to make a left turn onto Rt. 6. More importantly, you can go to more beaches without having to worry about parking tickets. This means you can more easily get out to enjoy this most premium season of bird fancying here on the Cape and Islands, especially if you fancy fancy birds like the Brown Booby recently seen from Race Point in Provincetown.
It's hard to beat Race Point for late summer birding, or really any time of year birding, but it's also hard to get there. Some park at Race Point Beach, itself a serious drive from anywhere, and walk more than two soft-sand miles south and west to get to the Race, others pay for over sand driving passes, still others walk out the Hatches Harbor dike, which is my favorite route. If you walk, it’ll end up being at least 5 miles round trip, so you might want notify your knees well ahead of time that it’s going to be a rough day.
But whether you walk, drive, or have your kids wheelbarrow you out there, you might get in on some of the most exciting seabird action anywhere in North America. Or it can be pretty dull – the stalwart seabirders are there every weekend, at least, to get their fix. The longest-serving regular, Blair Nikula, was recently rewarded with what has been an increasingly common, but still weird, sighting – a Brown Booby, up from the tropics.
Ten years ago a Brown Booby was a big deal – a “mega rarity,” generally shortened to just “mega” in the parlance of serious birdwatchers. They’re still rare – definitely fancy - but we’ve gone from one every five years to sometimes several sightings per year for some reason. A long-staying bird that liked to sit on the breakwaters at Corporation Beach in Dennis back in 2011 kicked off this new era of Brown Booby sightings in the Gulf of Maine. Maybe it’s these ever-warming waters in the Gulf, the same warming that brings more and more sea turtles north of the Cape, coaxing these normally tropical birds in off the Gulf Stream. Brown Boobies, normally birds you’d see from South Florida southwards, have been seen in mid-coast Maine and even Newfoundland in recent weeks.
But enough about the boobies – the more expected seabirds at Race are worth the trip themselves, currently including four species of ocean wandering shearwaters, marauding Parasitic and even the less common Long-tailed Jaegers, both chasing terns in beak -to-tail pursuit to steal their fish. Uncommon migrant shorebirds stop by the Race, like Baird’s Sandpipers and American Golden-Plovers. And then the terns – oh, the terns. Loud, restless staging flocks of mainly Common Terns but also perhaps many hundreds of federally Endangered Roseate Terns, all gorging on bait and preparing to leave for Brazil or West Africa.
And on and on. More than 300 species of birds have been recorded from Race Point, the second highest list of anywhere on the Cape and Islands – pretty impressive for a place of just sand, water, and maybe a few scraggly pines and beach plum thickets.
You don’t need to trek to the Race to see great late summer birds, of course. Hitting Fort Hill in Eastham, Wellfleet Bay sanctuary, the beaches of Chatham, and maybe hopping on a whale watch should bag you an enviable list of late summer and early fall birds, all without the five-mile-death march through soft sand. I certainly won’t fault you for choosing that option. And if you listen closely, you can hear your knees agreeing.
