On Saturday afternoon, just back from an overnight adventure among the thousands of nesting seabirds of Penikese Island, I was sitting in a parking lot in Woods Hole thinking about what I might say about the trip in this week’s bird report. Then I checked my email, and a new bird report topic rocketed to the top of the list. Rebekah Ambrose was asking for help identifying a bird she photographed in Barnstable, and her photos showed the first-ever Anhinga for the Cape and Islands.
Rebekah found the Anhinga sitting in a bare pondside tree at the Pogorelc Sanctuary, a little Barnstable Land Trust property often littered with roosting herons and egrets. But if you’ve ever seen one of these snakey cormorant relatives, you were probably in the Florida Everglades or some other deep-southern backwater. They are the ones that swim with their bodies underwater, their serpentine necks cruising around seemingly by themselves, hence their nickname of “snakebird”.
Like cormorants, they chase fish around underwater, propelling themselves with big webbed feet. Unlike cormorants, they catch the fish by skewering them right through the middle with their dagger bills. Then, no hands, they have to get the fish into their mouths, which they do by jerking their head to work the fish toward the tip of their beak, then tossing it up and catching it, ideally headfirst, in the beak. It’s a great party trick. Their feathers are not waterproof, so before they fly off they need to dry off, which means they need low perches by the water from which to drip dry.
“How many previous records of this accidental visitor have been accepted by the Mass Avian Records Committee?”, I’m sure you are asking. That’s an interesting question, so thanks for raising it. The Avian Records Committee maintains the official state bird list, as well as the list of rare species that need to be reviewed by the committee to be accepted. At one point, there were as many as 11 accepted records of Anhingas in Massachusetts. Of those, only last year’s bird, which spent a day at Burrage Pond in Hanson, was photographed, meaning all others were based on written eyewitness descriptions.
I was on the records committee back in 2011 when we received a submission with a convincing description of a high, soaring Anhinga from a skilled, well-known birder. The problem was there was a photo accompanying the write-up, and the photo showed it was actually a cormorant that, in his defense, was doing a pretty good Anhinga impression. We unanimously rejected the report, got spooked by the mistake, and eventually the committee went back and rejected a bunch of the old eyewitness reports without photos. They even went into the social science literature on the unreliability of eyewitness testimony in court cases to justify invalidating the old records, several of which I think were correct. As a result, there are currently just three accepted records of Anhinga for Massachusetts. None of the previous reports were from the Cape and Islands, so either way, this is unequivocally the first for our region.
Where that bird is now is anyone’s guess – unlike more accommodating rarities that settle in for days or even weeks, no Anhinga has ever been seen in Massachusetts for more than a few hours. I and several others checked later Saturday with no joy. If you think you’ve found it, to avoid the sting of a rejection by the Mass Avian Records Committee make sure to get photos.
