You may have noticed that it rained recently, for the first time in what seemed like years. In addition to a satisfying, multi-day soaking of our parched soils, this weather also brought the kind of winds that get the attention of storm bird chasers, that hardy and quirky subset of the already quirky subset of society that is birders. The big low-pressure system parked off the east coast brought several days of northeast winds, some strong enough to bring birds in from the Gulf of Maine, past the beckoning arm of the Cape and into the bay. But did it ultimately deliver the payload of offshore delights these storm birders sought? Was it worth the dulled car paint and pitted windshields from the wind-driven sand at those beach parking lots? Let’s find out together.
The first-place birders head in strong northeast winds is either Sandy Neck in Barnstable or Corporation Beach in Dennis – these places are well positioned for views of birds driven southwest into the corner of the bay. On Friday, birders were reporting numbers of shearwaters at Sandy Neck – Great, Cory’s, and Manx Shearwaters to be specific. Always a treat to see from land, these birds crave wind, using it to move almost effortlessly around the world’s oceans, to the point where they often refuse to fly in calm conditions. These shearwaters were probably back out into the big ocean shortly thereafter.
Other sightings from Sandy Neck on Friday included an impressive swarm of at least 5000 staging Tree Swallows, which are not seabirds, and a rare flock of American Golden-Plovers, also not seabirds. The plovers were likely knocked off track en route from Novia Scotia to Argentina, a several-thousand-mile migration they mostly complete via a single nonstop flight over the Atlantic. I wonder where they are right now? Saturday brought tough viewing conditions thanks to wind-driven rain, but several Leach’s Storm-Petrels passed Sandy Neck, so birders didn’t get completely skunked on storm birds.
The odd little sandpipers known as phalaropes are expected in a storm like this, and several Red-necked Phalaropes were seen at Corporation Beach on Saturday. A phalarope is weird in several categories – weird name, weird mating system, weird life history – the females are the colorful ones and may take several mates, and it’s a sandpiper that may never touch sand, as they spend summer on tundra and winter on the open ocean.
The best showing of phalaropes, and of storm birds in general was at Race Point in Provincetown, where a lot of the best seabirders assembled on Sunday, day four of northeast winds. There they had over 100 Red-necked Phalaropes, a single Red Phalarope, and a rare Little Gull, the world’s smallest gull, visiting from Europe. They tallied several hundred shearwaters of four species and an incredible total of more than a hundred Parasitic Jaegers, who, like the little phalaropes, are transitioning from tundra to ocean at this time of year. These are all enviable birds, but the grand prize for those who made the multi-mile trek to the Race was an Atlantic Puffin, an immature bird that dropped in to sit on the water for a bit.
Besides that storm, some other bird stories have been brewing, including a young Brown Pelican that has been loitering around Wellfleet and Eastham, and a tantalizing report on Monday of a possible Eurasian Kestrel, a species with vanishingly few records in North America, in the dunes of Provincetown, but that has yet to be confirmed. Be on the lookout in open grassy areas for a reddish-brown falcon, bigger than our American Kestrel, with a gray head and a long tail. If you want to be the star of next week’s bird report (and who doesn’t?), then get out there and find that falcon!
