On Nantucket this week, the birders are all having flashbacks to October of 2012, when Hurricane Sandy famously devastated parts of the East Coast. Famously among birders, that weird Frankenstorm also contributed to an unprecedented East Coast invasion of a spectacular European bird, three of which ended up on Nantucket. The bird is the big, gaudy plover called the Northern Lapwing, a bird whose trademark long, wispy crest can only be described as Seussian. After 12 lapwing-less years, the bird is back in town.
Last Friday, Nantucket birder Louis Dentiste was scanning the fields at Bartlett’s Farm from his car when he noticed an odd-shaped shorebird, sort of like the large plover known as a Killdeer but even bigger. Then he saw the characteristic wispy crest and realized this was a Northern Lapwing on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The resulting joyful panic, a feeling most birders can identify with, had Louis shaking and struggling to get out of the car – in birding, the adrenaline rush of finding what the kids these days call a “mega-rarity” is real. This was also a life bird for Louis, who wasn’t around for the lapwing invasion of 2012. Fumbling with your camera and praying the bird doesn’t flush are all part of those first moments of discovery. I know of what I speak, having had a lapwing moment of my own back in the day.
No one had ever seen a Northern Lapwing in Massachusetts until Vinyard naturalist and birder Allan Keith found one in Chilmark back in 1996. By the time Sandy was bearing down on the northeast, there were still only two records for Massachusetts, but that was about to change. A huge blocking high pressure system over the Atlantic brought several days of strong easterly winds, eventually transporting at least 11 Northern Lapwings, who were likely heading south from Scandinavia to mainland Europe, across the pond and depositing them around the northeast.
One of those, and I like to think the first, was found by me, a briefly happy idiot in what I thought was my crowning achievement in rare bird finding. Upon realizing we had no power at my office on that day following Superstorm Sandy, I headed instead to First Encounter Beach. Immediately upon getting out of my car, I saw a big, round-winged bird in odd, floppy flight over the marsh. I had birded Europe enough to know instantly what, and how rare, this was – a Northern Lapwing! I triumphantly texted some birders who responded with a polite “wow,” followed by “Vern has two on Nantucket.”
You see, Vern Laux and a golf-cart-load of birding companions, in the same Bartlett’s Farm fields hosting the current lapwing, had indeed found two at the same time as my Eastham bird. Those Nantucket lapwings cemented themselves into birding history as they stayed through the entire winter, were seen by tons of birders, and were even mysteriously joined by a third in March. Mine disappeared after an hour, never to be seen or remembered again.
But this Nantucket bird is still there, at least as of yesterday, though it has been staying behind the fences at Bartlett Farm. This species is unlike anything we have around here — a huge shorebird with broad, owl-like wings, that whimsical crest, and, in the right light, an iridescent green and purple back. To paraphrase Ferris Bueller, it is so choice - if you have the means, I highly recommend picking this bird up. And while you’re on the island, stay for the five Tundra Swans — these rare native swans are all but impossible to find in Mass but have become a near annual winter visitor on Nantucket for some reason.
If you do go see this Northern Lapwing, all I ask is that you take a minute afterwards to think of the tragically forgotten 2012 Northern Lapwing of Eastham, and the still emotionally scarred person who found it.
