As the 2024 Christmas Bird Count season recedes in our rear-view mirror, my window for the promised recap is rapidly closing. It’s high time I provided some highlights and species totals for at least some of the listening area’s 11 Christmas Bird Counts.
The count period kicked off with the back-to-back Buzzard’s Bay and Cape Cod counts on December 14 and 15th, respectively. The Cape Cod count is so old that it used to be the only one in the region, hence the name. On that one, observers tallied 133 species from Harwich to Eastham, with highlights including the count’s first ever Yellow Warbler, a chilly bird found skulking in East Orleans and wishing it had flown to Costa Rica or Columbia like most of its kin, as well as a furtive Sedge Wren at Fort Hill in Eastham, a mysterious, itinerant little bird of wet grasslands that looks like a bit of cattail fluff.
The Mid-Cape count, rich in bay and sound shorelines, ponds, fields, fruit-laden thickets, and marshes, often rakes in the most species of any in the state. This year we were hampered by throwback conditions – bitter cold and wind, reminiscent of the winters of old, kept bird activity down and the count total at a little over 130. That’s excellent for a New England count, but modest by Mid-Cape standards, with past highs in the 140s. Among many hard-earned highlights were a Western Tanager, a Dickcissel, a Glaucous Gull, and around 12,000 American Robins, mainly counted at evening roost sites. That’s actually a bit low, with past Mid-Cape robin counts in the tens of thousands to over 100 thousand.
Despite a foggy morning back on December 29, the Grey Lady of Nantucket ultimately revealed 138 species of birds to the 75 participants, many of them carpetbaggers from exotic foreign lands such as Connecticut. This gives the coveted Cape and Islands Christmas Bird Count species cup to the Nantucket count – congratulations folks! This is not an actual award, and there is certainly no prize, just bragging rights.
I oversee the Truro count, which can’t compete with the other local counts, species-wise, but we enjoy plying the back roads of picturesque Wellfleet and Truro, much of it swampy and woodsy National Park land. My birders found up to two Pacific Loons, always rare away from Race Point in Provincetown, as well as a Bohemian Waxwing, tons of Ruddy Turnstones, a couple of Barrow’s Goldeneyes, Clapper Rails, a couple of rare marsh birds known as Soras, and more.
It was a year where many of the rarest birds weren’t found on count day, which is always a kick in the pants for the count compiler. Examples include the Eared Grebe found the day after the count on Nantucket, shy Ash-throated Flycatchers that avoided the Mid-Cape and Buzzard’s Bay counts, a MacGillivray’s Warbler found the day before the Mid-Cape count that got stage fright on count day, and finally the oddly secretive Ferruginous Hawk of Chatham, a monumentally rare first state record which I suspect was present during the Cape count on the 15th. Then there’s the arm’s length list of wacky birds attempting to winter in Provincetown, including Black-chinned Hummingbird, Spotted Towhee, Western Tanager, and an Indigo Bunting and Black-throated Blue Warbler that were both at the same house hosting the Black-chinned Hummingbird. Despite this bounty of ornithological treasure, sadly, P’town is no longer in any Christmas Bird Count circle - the Stellwagen Bank count used to include a land-based sector but was moved to be entirely offshore several years back.
With the counts over, birders have moved into year-listing mode, scurrying around to snag various unusual birds for their 2025 list, like the ultra-wacky Northern Lapwing, a fancy European plover, currently drawing crowds at Fort Rodman in New Bedford. But not me, I’m planning for December – after all, there are only 333 birding days until the 2025 Christmas Bird Count season.
