Just when I thought I had a topic, some late-breaking bird news sends me back to the drawing board. Literally as I was sitting down to write this week’s piece, a message came across the Cape Cod birders texting app from one of the hardest working birders in show business, Mary Keleher of Mashpee. It included a photo of a small, grayish bird perched on an exposed twig at South Cape Beach State Park. This otherwise drab bird’s identity was betrayed by a bit of salmon pink on the belly and a shadow of a dark mask – this was a female Vermilion Flycatcher, just the second official record for the Cape and islands.
Vermilion Flycatchers exhibit pretty extreme sexual dimorphism, meaning males and females look very different. An adult male sears the retina with that intense namesake vermilion, which is an orangey red for the obscure-color-challenged. The gray female barely musters a faded, reddish wash, scarcely visible on the underbelly. They breed from the Southwestern US down through Central and South America, including a population that flies north for the winter from Argentina to Brazil. Somewhere in Buenos Aires right now, a teacher is reminding their students that birds fly north for the winter. I’ll be you never thought about that, did you?
If you follow this report, or the birding arts in general, you may remember a Vermilion Flycatcher that I managed to find in Brewster almost exactly two years ago, a young male bird that became a media darling well beyond this space. At the time, it was the first known record for the Cape, Islands, or South Coast, and, depending on the source, either just the fourth or 7th ever for Massachusetts. Since then, a single observer, single day record in Hanson back in January of this year added to the state total – why is this mostly tropical bird turning up more and more? The answer is, no one knows.
The weirdest Vermilion Flycatcher record for New England came from Maine back in April of 2017. The first and only state record of this species was, naturally, discovered by someone sitting at a computer in Germany. You see, the bird was perched in front of Hog Island Osprey nest cam, and one of the German-based camera operators noticed the strange, bright red bird, zoomed in, and took a little video. Local Hog Island folks saw it, got the word out and the rest is Maine birding history.
Earlier in the day yesterday, Mike Tucker found a Western Kingbird at Peterson Farm in Falmouth, the most regular of the lost western vagrants this time of year, but always a spiffy find here in the East. That bird was later viciously upstaged by the Vermilion Flycatcher, but it adds evidence that there may be other western and southwestern vagrants out there to be found. Given that this is the peak migration period, maybe for the entire year, there are lots of all kinds of things to be found. We had some nice fallouts of more expected migrants last Friday and then continuing over the weekend when the winds were finally out of the north. Diligent field observers and bird banding stations produced things like Scarlet Tanagers, vireos, thrushes, over a dozen species of warblers, several newly arrived sparrow species, Indigo
Buntings, and more, plus the more obvious Yellow-rumped Warblers that are suddenly everywhere.
So get out in this splendid early fall weather, and open your eyes and your heart to birds around you. Have your camera ready, because especially right now, with new birds arriving every day, the next newsworthy ornithological discovery could be around that next corner.
