A visit from two rare birds

Early yesterday morning, 3AM to be exact, my son requested the dreaded middle of the night parental visit. On my way into his dark room, I stepped on one of his many spiky dinosaur toys and tore my foot up pretty good – it looked like an actual T-Rex had gotten it. Later in the day, as I limped around, the right topic for this week’s Bird Report became clear – I needed to talk about the Limpkin in Scituate – please excuse the lame pun. Going further afield, there’s an even more unexpected visitor to discuss. What do they have in common? Both have iconic calls, and neither has been seen yet here on the Cape.
 
That Limpkin is the long-awaited first record for New England of this snail-snarfing wading bird of tropical wetlands. Oddly, it turned up just a few miles from where the state’s first Roseate Spoonbill appeared back in October. Normally we hog all the rare birds here on the Cape, but the greater Scituate to Duxbury area is eating our lunch this fall, especially with tropical wetland birds. For some reason Limpkins, mainly two-year old birds, have been wandering northwards out of Florida a ton over the last several years. An entire peer-reviewed paper in an ornithological journal probed the reasons over several pages before boldly concluding that several factors may be at play. In fairness they said they’re leaning towards drought.
 
The Limpkin, which is the sole member of its family and most closely related to cranes, lives in warm wetlands from South Georgia to Argentina, specializing on large snails which they extract with their specialized tweezer-tipped bill. It’s wild sounding call is often used to convey a sense of tropical jungle-ness in movies. You can hear their haunting screams, mainly at night, in the vastness of the Florida Everglades or the borrow-pit pond behind your condo in Orlando. This one in Scituate is more of the suburban type – not finding any of the huge snails from back home, it’s walking around a dense neighborhood and eating grubs from the lawns. One photo in eBird shows it standing on the roof of a Tesla. It was still there yesterday for you rare bird chasers and Boston commuters.
 
Meanwhile, in New Hampshire, there’s an even more lost bird that made headlines to the degree that non-birding friends were tagging me in posts about it. It was a Common Cuckoo, the very real version of the European and Asian bird that pops out of those old clocks. I really love cuckoos – they are like flying fun-fact factories. They are oddly big, falcon-shaped songbirds with long tails, staring yellow eyes, and weird hunched postures. They lay eggs in other birds’ nests, tricking them into raising their babies. They are among the few birds that relish hairy caterpillars. The populations in China and Russia migrate farther than almost any land bird, across Asia and the Indian ocean to Southern Africa. We know this thanks to a female Common Cuckoo tracked by the British Trust for Ornithology named Flappy McFlaperson by schoolchildren.
 
The New Hampshire Common Cuckoo may not have been around here, but their history as a vagrant to the lower 48 states began here, with a bird that was amazingly caught in a mist net in Vineyard Haven back in May of 1981. At the time the only other records in the entire New World outside of Alaska were from Greenland and Barbados. None have visited the Cape and Islands since, but one turned up at a farm in Rhode Island five years ago, and in the last few weeks there’s been the one in New Hampshire plus one on Long Island.
 
So while they’ve never been seen here on the Cape, with recent Common Cuckoo records in abutting states, plus Limpkins popping up around the Eastern US, not to mention the next county over, it’s not too cuckoo to think we could be next.