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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On Monday, though it’s full-on tourist season and many of my local friends had been putting out “shelter in place” warnings on social media, I bravely ventured from the Lower Cape to deep in the heart of the Upper Cape.
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Recently, Mass Audubon has turned its conservational gaze upon an inconspicuous and imperiled coastal resident. This saltmarsh sprite lives life on the edge, only nesting in the daily-flooded coastal marshes from southern Maine to Chesapeake Bay, where they struggle to complete their nesting cycle between the monthly high tides.
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While kite-o-rama continues on the Cape, with both kite species still turning up from Mashpee to Harwich, the Vineyard scored this week with an even less likely bird with a long, bifurcated tail.
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Mid-June is kind of like the slack tide in the Cape ornithological calendar. Songbird and shorebird migration are over, with most birds now busy breeding across the Northern Hemisphere.
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We have a backlog of old business to attend to here at Bird Report central, namely, what’s going on with breeding birds right now? The answer is, they are battling for their lives and the lives of their children in this war zone we call the suburbs.
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What’s lanky and lost and pink all over? It’s the American Flamingo that spent Sunday afternoon at Chapin Beach in Dennis. Only a lucky few got to see it, but this real, actual flamingo was indeed there. But how did it get there, and where did it come from?
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It finally happened, for me anyway, on Friday morning. By “it,” I mean some clear evidence of newly arrived migrants of a number worthy of mid-to-late May.
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We’re entering the home stretch of spring migration, but, here on the Cape, it still feels like a sputtering engine that can’t quite turn over.
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Last week I predicted our first real migrant songbird fallout of May on Thursday morning. Sadly, that did not materialize, probably because of too much rain between us and the birds that night, stopping them short of New England.
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When did your “spring is finally here” birds arrive? At my house, spring came Monday, April 29.