Mark Faherty

Another week, another lost flycatcher from some far-flung locale has turned up. This one had been flung further than most, having perhaps started its journey as far away as Argentina. SOUTHERN Argentina. Sadly for local birders, though present almost a week, this premium rarity of supra-regional interest wasn't reported until several days after it had disappeared from the Chatham neighborhood it frequented. I was among the saddest of local birders given that this now-long-gone bird had been perching on street-level telephone wires ten-minutes from my house. This lost flycatcher was the absurdly proportioned Fork-tailed Flycatcher.

Let’s face it, we all woke up this morning with the same question: what’s going on with seabirds right now? I’m glad you asked, because the answer is “a whole helluva lot.”

Cory's are the biggest of our four shearwaters, a group of wind-surfing seabirds who navigate the trackless oceans by smell, riding the wind deflected upwards off waves to effortlessly cover hundreds of miles in search of fish and squid. The northwesterly gale had apparently pushed yesterday's shearwaters to shore, and I watched as scores of these open ocean birds were cycling in and out of the harbor, the Sandy Neck lighthouse and cottage colony in the background. The big Cory's were joined by a minority of Manx Shearwaters, just a handful, distinguished by their darker backs, smaller size, and much faster wingbeats.

Does anyone else remember the good ol' days, when towhees were Rufous-sided and harriers were Marsh Hawks? I sure do.

It's Thanksgiving Eve, so I suppose you expect me to dish out the usual stale, leftover poultry puns sandwiched between the same old turkey fun facts. Well, you're right. So let's not mince words and get right into the meat of the topic.

On Nantucket this week, the birders are all having flashbacks to October of 2012, when Hurricane Sandy famously devastated parts of the East Coast. Famously among birders, that weird Frankenstorm also contributed to an unprecedented East Coast invasion of a spectacular European bird, three of which ended up on Nantucket. The bird is the big, gaudy plover called the Northern Lapwing, a bird whose trademark long, wispy crest can only be described as Seussian. After 12 lapwing-less years, the bird is back in town.

The most joyous season is finally here! That glorious time that we eagerly anticipate all year long. The food! The joyful gatherings! The binoculars!

This is one of those cases where a bird in the hand was going to be worth at least two in the bush. We needed a licensed hummingbird bander to catch and examine it.

Amidst the silent majesty of this cold Christmas morn, I can only assume you are all gathered around the radio, in the warm embrace of kith and kin, waiting to hear the latest results of the local bird counts.

With just a few days left in 2024, the undisputed bird of the year for Cape Cod was found in Chatham. Well, I suppose that flamingo in Dennis, the one that made national and even international news, was the actual undisputed bird of the year, but this bird found Sunday could eat the flamingo, so I'm handing it the trophy. Plus, it's sort of like when movies purposely released closer to date of the Oscars tend to win – their fresher in your memory. Like the flamingo, yesterday's monumental find was a first ever record for Massachusetts. It's a big, uncommon, western hawk you may never have heard of, the formidable Ferruginous Hawk. Even weirder, this was a rare dark morph, as opposed to the much more common light morph.