As an old school winter sets in, with snow and everything, you may be tempted to hunker down and settle for feeder birds viewed from the warm side of a window until the spring thaw. But I’m here to tell you there are many birdy reasons to venture beyond your dooryard this winter, and while you should bundle up for some, others don’t even require getting out of the car.
One classic choose your-own adventure in Outer Cape winter birding is to look for flocks of Cedar Waxwings in case any are harboring one or more of their larger, more northerly cousins, Bohemian Waxwings. Every winter a few make it to the Outer Cape even when other areas are seeing none, I suspect ours blow down from Nova Scotia. Just yesterday, some lucky birders scored in this regard, finding almost a dozen Bohemian Waxwings in a big group of Cedar Waxwings at the Truro winery. Bohemians are bigger and slightly grayer than the local Cedars, with more colorful markings on the wings and red under the tail. Their trilling call is much lower pitched and more rattling than the dog whistle calls of Cedar Waxwings. Look for waxwings where flocks of robins and starlings are also feeding on fruit, like bittersweet vines, multiflora rose, cedars, or hollies like American holly or winterberry.
If you’re a masochist, I’ve got just the winter birding task for you. Every winter, thousands of the big sea ducks known as Common Eiders gather in the south end of Pleasant Bay in Chatham to feed on mussels and crabs. In the last week I’ve seen reports of up to 34000 eiders off North Chatham landings, which is more than I’ve seen in recent years. Common Eiders weigh as much as 6 pounds, which means this flock could weigh in at over 200,000 pounds depending on how many mussels they just ate.
I try to get down there every year to see this under-the-radar local wildlife spectacle. How often do you get to see tens of thousands of any vertebrate animal in one scan? And this is one you can do without getting out of the car, though it’s better if you do. The flocks come within feet of the shore depending on the tide, and it’s fun to watch them dive for mussels as they ride the current over the submerged beds, before eventually flying back to the top of the current to start a new drift. The effect is of a huge conveyor belt at some biological factory that turns mussels into muscles, if you catch my drift.
The masochistic task I mentioned is scanning through the tens of thousands of Common Eiders to find the at least two King Eiders that have been seen this week. Finding the female is more of a PhD level birding task, as females of both eiders are brown, with slightly different head and bill shapes. A male King Eider is striking when you finally see one, with a huge powder blue head and bulbous electric orange and red bills that look more like a growth they need to get checked out than an actual design feature.
If you’re at the other end of the Cape, the canal is the classic place to do this same thing – a King Eider or two usually joins the big eider flocks up and down the canal. Some years the flocks get into the high thousands. All of this pales in comparison to the hundreds of thousands that winter invisibly just offshore of Monomoy most years, where there can be a half-million eiders some winters.
The eiders will be predictably parked in those spots for the winter, so you have time to catch the show. The waxwings, on the other hand, are more elusive. Last I heard, those wandering waxwings seen at the vineyard in Truro fell into the classic tourist trap, buying a case of so-so wine after the free samples went to their heads, so they may be too embarrassed to stick around.
