Weekly Bird Report
The Weekly Bird Report with Mark Faherty can be heard every Wednesday on WCAI, the local NPR station for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and the South Coast. 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. He is past president of the Cape Cod Bird Club and current member of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee.
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I finally have a little time to watch birds each day, and it’s all thanks to the Monomoy School District. Between my kindergarten-aged son’s absurdly early bus time of 6:52 AM and the time we have to get my daughter up for pre-school, I have one deliciously unstructured hour. -
Hurricane, then Tropical Storm, then “Post-Tropical Cyclone” Lee has come and gone. Lee barely grazed us with some ho-hum 50 mph gusts that downed a few trees, having passed well to our east. But how did it score in storm-birding terms?
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Birders are all secretly hoping Lee comes, and that Lee is bringing lots of gifts in the form of rare, storm-blown birds.
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Hundreds of thousands of shorebirds and seabirds breed, feed, and rest on Chatham’s barrier beaches. Importantly for these ISS surveys, thousands of normally kinetic shorebirds take a break from feeding to rest in certain parts of Monomoy during the high tide, at which point they are relatively easy to count.
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Fall migration is an Irish goodbye – by the time you notice you’re not hearing the catbirds anymore, they’ve been gone two weeks.
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The Lesser Sand-Plover, that enigmatic Asian visitor who brought birders from at least as far away as Canada, was ominously absent from South Cape Beach in Mashpee after 8 AM yesterday.
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Rhode Island is no slouch in the rare bird game - places like the Charlestown Breachway, Napatree Point, and Block Island have produced many a rarity that sent Massachusetts birders speeding down I-95.
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I highly recommend paying attention to the bees visiting your yard. Just like with birding, you never know what you may find. Some tiny bees I noticed visiting male winterberry at Wellfleet Bay sanctuary last month turned out to be armored resin bees, a group never before recorded on the Cape and Islands.
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As we round the corner of mid-summer, with Labor Day now dimly visible at the horizon, it’s time you got serious about shorebirds.
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The bird was indeed a plover, but not the one they were tasked with watching. This was a Mountain Plover, a scarce species of the high, dry plains east of the rockies, and one that eluded me thus far in my birding career.
