Mark Faherty

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.

I heard that others had seen several Piping Plovers, very unusual for January, so I trudged out to the flats for a look. I found four of them feeding with two Semipalmated Plovers, also too far north for the date, and snapped some photos, risking the loss of several digits in the cold whenever I took my mittens off. After a few minutes the plovers stopped feeding and roosted, taking advantage of some micro-topographic feature on the flats to avoid the blowing sand, and I went back to scanning for the hawk. Suddenly a big bird rocketed into view – a Peregrine Falcon, death missile of the tidal flats, no doubt hunting the shorebirds.

As the 2024 Christmas Bird Count season recedes in our rear-view mirror, my window for the promised recap is rapidly closing.

As this throwback winter plods on, with ice fishers on the ponds and ice floes on the bay, one of the most common questions us bird folks get is “how do birds survive these brutal temperatures?”

By mid-winter, the prize rare birds have all been established and often settle into a routine. As such, the bird chasers continue to make pilgrimages to Morris Island in Chatham to view the state's first Ferruginous Hawk, Fort Rodman in New Bedford to view the cooperative Northern Lapwing visiting from Europe, then scooching over the border to farmy Portsmouth, Rhode Island to check off the ultra-rare Tundra Bean-Goose, which nests on Siberia tundra and winters no closer than Western Europe. Of those three, the goose is technically the rarest, having never been seen in New England before ten days ago.

Sometimes getting off the wrong exit proves to be the right choice. So it was yesterday, when I got off exit 10, as I will always know it, instead

A lanky and mysterious stranger arrived in Provincetown last week, where he is often seen loitering near the famous Boy Beach at the west end. Flamboyantly arrayed in feathers, this visitor has developed quite a following, but it's not for a drag show at the Post Office Cabaret. The tall, feathered figure is a Sandhill Crane, and it has become the rare bird-du-jour for Cape birders.

When Bald Eagles took over an Osprey nest on the Outer Cape two years ago it meant that, for the first time since the 1800s out here, the eagle had landed. Sadly, thanks to that wind storm a few weekends ago, their nest also landed, with a thud, on the hillside below. The old telephone pole had rotted enough at the bottom that it snapped, sending the old platform and nest crashing to the ground, just as the pair had been seen mating in preparation for egg laying. Rotten timing for a rotten pole and a windstorm.

Believe it or not, the first day of what passes for spring is just ten days out. But the birds don't wait for astronomical spring to get moving – many