Though we’re back to short-sleeve weather and barely a leaf has reached the ground, I assure you it is indeed late October, which means that All Hallows Eve is upon us.

Lately I’ve been looking for birds in a small community garden near my daughter’s school in Orleans — as we saw with last week’s state-first Virginia’s Warbler, community gardens can yield a bountiful bird harvest in fall.

Ornithologist Mark Faherty says the fall season of rare bird sightings on Cape Cod has just started.

On Monday morning, as my son and I walked to the bus stop a little before 7, I was already hearing warblers. Specifically, I was hearing the flight calls these little songbirds give during migration.

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?

Birders are all secretly hoping Lee comes, and that Lee is bringing lots of gifts in the form of rare, storm-blown birds.

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.

Fall migration is an Irish goodbye – by the time you notice you’re not hearing the catbirds anymore, they’ve been gone two weeks.

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.