Last week I covered the Brood XIV 17-year cicadas and the birds that love them, but it turned out the birds weren’t quite done adding to this story. I covered how a lot of the landbirds, from songbirds to rare insectivorous hawks from away, were binging at the cicada banquet, and how it might improve their breeding success. This week we have some water birds that discovered the easy pickings of the now waning cicada flight, including a real doozy of a rare bird that turned up in a weird place.
Upper Cape birder Jim Carroll got word from his wife that an interesting bird was walking around the parking lot of Mashpee High School last Friday. This lanky, all white bird turned out to be a White Ibis, a bird you may have seen on one of your winter trips to Florida, but I can just about guarantee you’ve never seen one around here in June – this was the second ever June record of a White Ibis for all of New England. The other was in Harwich back in 1986. White Ibises now breed as close as coastal New Jersey, but unlike people from New Jersey, they apparently don’t come to the Cape in summer.
It was there to eat cicadas, which it was doing not on the grassy edges or planted islands of the parking lot, but literally among the parking spaces, snatching them up as they landed haplessly on the blacktop. The ibis was gone the next day, but some birders got there in time to see it and get some photos, including Mike Tucker whose amazing shots are on the Bird Report website. White Ibises are related to herons egrets, and especially spoonbills, so normally forage in standing water. I can’t find anything in the literature about them eating cicadas, but they have a pretty catholic diet in my experience – I’ve seen them picking through trash cans in Florida parks. But their favorite food down there is crayfish, and a cicada is basically a flying crayfish, so why not try one? I’ve heard you can’t eat just one.
Other birders have noticed another big waterbird taking advantage of the crunchy 17-year manna from heaven – gulls. Both Herring and Great Black-backed Gulls were seen in numbers hawking cicadas over Mashpee Pond as well as the same cicada-laden neighborhood in Centerville that was hosting the Mississippi Kites last week. Big numbers of gulls are not normally in these locations, especially this time of year, so they went pretty far off their normal beat to take advantage of these bugs. I don’t think I have to go into the dietary literature on gulls to solve this mystery - any beach-going Cape Codder knows they will eat anything that’s not nailed down. They’d eat you if they could.
It's not clear if it was also munching cicadas, but another one-day wonder turned up last Thursday at Bourne Farm, part of Salt Pond Area Bird Sanctuaries in Falmouth. It was a Say’s Phoebe, a salmon colored, western cousin of our local Eastern Phoebes. This was the first June or July record for New England and maritime Canada as far as I can tell, so to say it was unexpected by birders is putting it mildly.
I’d like to say this is my last piece about birds and cicadas, but this past week has taught me that I can’t really guarantee that until the very last one of these screaming, subterranean weirdos of brood XIV disappears down the gullet of a bird. If any more interesting cicada and bird stories emerge in the last week, I think I’ll just save it for my next 17-year cicada piece in the year 2042.
