When it comes to bird photography, experienced practitioners know that sometimes it’s best to shoot first and ask questions later. What I mean is, even expert birders don’t always know exactly what they’re looking at until they get home and look at the photos. This week’s top birds are cases in point, or I guess cases in point-and-shoot…
Jeff Hendrickx was shooting birds, photographically speaking, at Forest Beach in Chatham last week when he noticed a little gray and white bird on top of a small tree. He recognized it as a shrike, presumably a Northern Shrike like the ones we see rarely in winter, and procured a superb full frame shot of the bird. But upon submitting his photos to the social media hordes, he learned that this was a much more exciting find – as everyone on the Cape Cod Birders Facebook group pointed out, this was an uber-rare Loggerhead Shrike.
Shrikes are birds that “punch above their weight”, as they say. Though quite a bit smaller than a robin, a Loggerhead Shrike can kill and eat other birds and mice sort of like a tiny hawk, except they do it without sharp talons. Shrikes break the necks of birds and mammals with their stout, notched and hooked beaks, then often impale the victims on a big thorn or a barbed wire fence to be eaten later, giving them a pretty creepy serial killer vibe, and also their nickname – “butcher birds”. Northern Shrikes breed well to the north at the limits of the boreal forest, and we may see one or two around here each winter. But Loggerhead Shrikes are more of a southern and western bird, and a rapidly declining one at that, so these days we never expect to see them in Massachusetts.
This Loggerhead Shrike was nice enough to stay a second day at Forest Beach, allowing me to see it. My four-year-old daughter and I had a splendid late afternoon with the shrike and with all else a September barrier beach has to offer here on the Cape, like fish and shorebirds and crabs and warm water. She politely glanced at the shrike when I insisted, then went back to whatever project she had going – she’s never bored. By the end she had me carrying dixie cups full of sand and shells and had filled my pockets with sea pickle plants to be brought home for later consumption. Having seen and photographed my target bird, plus bonus birds like Marbled Godwit and Parasitic Jaeger, I was feeling good, and happy to play porter for her beach treasures.
Lastly, a more extreme example of the importance of looking closely at your photos. Skilled local birder and naturalist Hans Holbrook was on a family whale watch off Provincetown a couple weeks back, and as birders do, he was focusing on the shearwaters and other seabirds among the whales. As he tells it, he was feverishly shooting the fast-moving birds while wearing sunglasses and didn’t get around to looking at the photos for almost three weeks. “Imagine my surprise” he said about one bird, “…it looks to be a Fea’s Petrel”.
The surprise comes from the fact that there are only two previous records for all of New England of this mysterious bird, part of a group of fast-flying seabirds known as the gadfly petrels. Fea’s Petrels nest on islands off Portugal and mainly stick around that area, though some venture across the pond to ply the Gulf Stream waters off the Carolinas. Little is known of their nesting biology or even their diet, and many can’t even agree on how to even divide up the various petrel species in the eastern Atlantic. Fea’s is not just rare here, it’s just rare – there may only be 2000 of them in the world.
What does this all mean for you, vaguely bird-interested listener? Maybe not much, but if you have a stockpile of bird photos from that last whale watch or beach walk, it’s time to start sorting through them – who knows what rare avian treasure you may find among the blurry shots of your thumb.
