Another week, another lost flycatcher from some far-flung locale has turned up. This one had been flung further than most, having perhaps started its journey as far away as Argentina. SOUTHERN Argentina. Sadly for local birders, though present almost a week, this premium rarity of supra-regional interest wasn’t reported until several days after it had disappeared from the Chatham neighborhood it frequented. I was among the saddest of local birders given that this now-long-gone bird had been perching on street-level telephone wires ten-minutes from my house. This lost flycatcher was the absurdly proportioned Fork-tailed Flycatcher.
Fork-tailed Flycatchers are in the kingbird genus and look a bit like our familiar Eastern Kingbird if one had accidentally been apportioned a quadruple-length, forked tail. The spectacular outer tail feathers on an adult male are more than twice the length of the body. Various populations live from Mexico to southern South America, and those southern populations fly north to the Amazon for their winter in what would be our spring, the mirror image of how our birds migrate.
This is something like the 13th record of Fork-tailed Flycatcher for the Cape, Islands, and South Coast, most of those from Wellfleet to Chatham and on Martha’s Vineyard, where one was photographed as recently as this past June. Thirteen is not a lot, but it’s way more than zero, which is the only logical number of flycatchers from Argentina we should expect to find here. Oddly, most Fork-tailed Flycatcher records in the US occur in fall, when all populations should be either sedentary or flying south, instead of in our spring when you might expect one to overshoot Trinidad and end up here. Go figure, but it’s one of the many mysteries surrounding birds that end up in weird places.
In other news, someone kicked up an equally rare bird, a Yellow Rail, in a marsh in Mashpee, something every serious birder fantasizes about when walking through wet meadows. I know I do – I’ve still never seen one of these tiny, ultra-secretive, and mysterious little North American marsh birds anywhere in my travels. Still someone else found a Western Tanager in Barnstable, and a few people have reported Painted Buntings on the Outer Cape in the last couple of weeks. Rarity season is clearly in full swing.
It's worth noting that the improbable Fork-tailed Flycatcher was found and photographed not by some wild-eyed birder busting brush in remote, tick-laden conservation land, but by a non-birder walking his dog around the neighborhood. Another was found by one of my non-birding coworkers at Wellfleet Bay back in 2009 – all she did was look up while she was eating lunch right outside the staff door, then walk inside and describe the odd, long-tailed bird to me.
I’ll bet you engage in such adventurous rare bird-finding activities as walking your dog around the neighborhood and eating lunch. All I’m asking you to do is look around a bit while you do and take some notice of any birds that reveal themselves– you might find one with some interesting stamps in its passport. And if you do find something weird, please don’t wait until it’s been gone for a week before you tell me – that’s just mean.
