Spring migration built to a thunderous crescendo this week - an astounding volume and variety of common and rare migrants alike surfed into the region on the wave of warm air over the weekend, more than I could ever justly describe in this short piece. I will begin with the ibises – so many ibises.
Prior to this year, the state high count of White Ibises, primarily a bird of southeastern states, was 5, set last year at famous migrant trap Gooseberry Neck in Westport. Before that, there were scarce and scattered reports of singles up to a few back as far as 1954, with no records before then. This week’s invasion began when a single White Ibis was found at South Cape Beach in Mashpee on the 14th. Then six settled into the marshes of West Harwich on Saturday, setting a new state record high count.
But the ibises were just getting warmed up – on Sunday, 22 White Ibises flew over Scusset Beach in Sandwich, obliterating the state record, before going on to be seen in Hyannis and eventually Provincetown. That this same flock was seen by several different birders at three widely separated locations constitutes a successful test of the emergency rare bird detection system here on Cape Cod. The deal with White Ibises is that they have been expanding their breeding range northwards for many years, from Florida to the Carolinas, then Virginia, then more recently establishing a breeding colony in New Jersey that went from zero to about 1000 birds just since 2020. So the makings of this week’s invasion have been brewing for years to our south.
A parade of other southern birds joined the ibises this week, with sightings of Hooded and Kentucky Warblers, Swallow-tailed and Mississippi Kites, Summer Tanagers, a Lark Sparrow, and finally, yesterday, a Scissor-tailed Flycatcher missed Oklahoma by a wide margin when it settled on a fence post at Peterson Farm in Falmouth. On the Vineyard, Aquinnah got in on the action with a rare Lark Bunting normally found on the western plains, and Nantucket produced a rare spring record of a Western Tanager.
But for my money, the biggest story in birding was not this who’s who of rare birds, but rather a fallout of the more common and expected spring migrants up at Race Point in Provinvetown. This fallout was sniffed out by young local ornithologist Liam Waters, who read the tea leaves on Saturday night – southwest winds, heavy migration predicted on Cornell’s BirdCast website, heavy visible movement of nocturnally migrating birds on local doppler radar, and bands of rain after midnight, the type that forces migrating birds in off the water. With all this in place, he headed from Sharon to P’town, arriving at dawn. Over the next several hours Liam tallied thousands of migrants of 93 species passing the Provincetown Airport, mostly warblers en route to northern forests.
His totals included 242 Eastern Kingbirds, over 800 Blue Jays, 700 Cedar Waxwings, and 500 Bobolinks, a species that traveled from southern South America to get there. Among the 3000 mostly unidentifiable warblers that passed he was able to tease out 22 species, including dozens of Magnolia, Bay-breasted, Cape May, and Blackpoll Warblers, among many others. Yesterday Blair Nikula tallied another 1500 Cedar Waxwings passing the airport, the most he’d seen in his five decades of birding the Cape.
These thousands of birds coming in off the Atlantic at Race Point are a small fraction of the total passing over the region and quietly dropping into parks and yards to rest and feed. Consider these weary travelers when you plan your landscaping – native trees and shrubs, ones not sprayed with pesticides, provide the caterpillars and other bugs they need to get them to their final destination to make their babies. That’s all it takes. Maybe you needed Barry White or Tom Jones and some booze, but all most songbirds need to make more birds is bugs.
