Mark Faherty

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. The result was a Mass Audubon Bird-a-thon weekend with species highlights that might as well have been from January – things like murres and lingering winter gulls and ducks were among the top Cape and Islands sightings from this 24-hour, Friday to Saturday birding blitz. The May bird explosion would have to wait a little longer, it seemed.

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. I’ve made valiantly optimistic predictions about what various southwest wind events might bring us the last two weeks and have mostly been wrong - no big overnight fallouts of songbirds have yet materialized, as too many days of northeast winds have kept them away. But if you look hard enough you can still find some measure of migration, perhaps, like me, right in your own neighborhood.

This week, we take an in-depth look at the humble House Sparrow. No, I’m kidding - I will of course be covering the major regional news item that this week’s weirdo rare bird has become. 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?

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. Birders have to figure out how to occupy themselves during this annual lull in bird movement. You could just enjoy our breeding birds to the fullest, reveling in the bounty of chicks in backyards and on beaches right now. You can make the trek out to Race Point in Provincetown, somehow, in hopes of catching a vagrant seabird, like the Franklin’s Gull and Royal Tern photographed there by some lucky birders this week. Or, you can figure out what the hell is going on with Swallow-tailed Kites on the Upper Cape. I hope someone chooses the latter and fills me in, because I sure don’t know.

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. There, birders know, lies a complex of managed grasslands and other open pine barren habitats of the sort largely gone from Cape Cod, a haven for all sorts of birds, plants, and insects you won’t find anywhere else in our region. I’m talking about Crane Wildlife Management Area and the restricted access military lands of Camp Edwards and Otis Air Force Base, which together host the last remaining populations of many grassland-dependent species here on Cape Cod.

On Monday morning, M. J. Foti was in shorebirding mode. The retired local teacher and Cape Cod Bird Club board member was out on the vast flats of Chapin Beach in Dennis volunteering to count sandpipers, plovers, and their ilk for Manomet’s International Shorebird Survey project. As she sorted through the little, brown, notoriously difficult sandpipers on the flats, a somewhat more distinctive, 4-foot-tall pink bird suddenly materialized on the flats. As she described it, her heart skipped a beat – the famous Dennis flamingo of last month had returned!

Let’s face it, insects suffer from a likeability deficit akin to that of most politicians, what with the biting and the disease transmission and the landing on your food right when you’re about to eat it and all. But I think we can all get behind butterflies, those harmless, even beneficial, and undeniably beautiful ambassadors for the insect world.

In all my years of camping and doing field work around the US I never knew that flying squirrels could be camp scavengers.

It’s not just back to school time for kids, all those billions of young birds that hatched over the spring and summer need to learn how to be birds, and it’s a real school of hard knocks.

More than 300 species of birds have been recorded from Race Point, the second-highest list of anywhere on the Cape and Islands.