Mark Faherty
Mark Faherty writes the Weekly Bird Report.
Mark has been the Science Coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary since August 2007 and has led birding trips for Mass Audubon since 2002. While his current projects involve everything from oysters and horseshoe crabs to bats and butterflies, he has studied primarily bird ecology for the last 20 years, working on research projects in Kenya, Florida, Texas, California, Arizona, Mexico, and the Pacific Northwest. He was a counter for the famous River of Raptors hawk watch in Veracruz, Mexico, and has birded Africa, Panama, Belize, and both Eastern and Western Europe. Mark is an emcee and trip leader for multiple birding festivals and leads workshops on birding by ear, eBird, birding apps, and general bird identification. He is past president of the Cape Cod Bird Club and current member of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee.
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Now that summer is fully here in tourism terms, it’s peak time for whale watches — a must on anyone’s list of summer activities, whether you’re a salty local or a wide-eyed weekly renter. -
Recently, my agent, Scott Boras, renegotiated my Bird Report contract with CAI. In addition to guaranteed 7 figure salary and performance bonuses, I am now able to talk about insects whenever I want.
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A striking and unusual species has come a knocking on Cape Cod this month, a bird we rarely see. Adults of this mystery species have been seen in Provincetown last month and Falmouth last week.
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For years now, I have been trolling my poor wife by refusing to cover the one bird report topic she always requested. I once went so far as to pretend I was doing the requested piece in the opening lines before veering off to a different topic.
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For most of the smartphone era people have asked me “when will I be able to just hold my phone up and have it tell me what birds I’m hearing, you know, like Shazam does with music?”. “Ha!” I would chuckle derisively, “maybe never.
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Happy first day of meteorological summer! It never really feels like summer here until the tourist explosion in early July, but it helps to think of this last shoulder month, when us locals can get some beach time in, as “summer”.
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So this is it. The biggest week in the birding calendar. The week when, as far as topics go, I have 50 rare birds to pick from, a hundred interesting happenings in backyard breeding bird biology to discuss, and two dozen charming birding anecdotes to relate.
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If you were out in nature at all this Friday or Saturday, you may have noticed some people with binoculars looking a bit crazed, perhaps more unkempt even than usual, checking their watches and rushing about on trails.
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Do you remember what it was like 450 million years ago? Neither do I. But horseshoe crabs, somewhere in their DNA, remember. They were around in some form over 200 million years before dinosaurs first appeared, and 300 million years before birds.
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It’s now finally May, which means spring, and spring migration, get serious. Gardens look like gardens again, bees are about, and just like that, familiar birds are back.
