April 2025

Front Cover: April 2025

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:16 GMT

Least Flycatcher by Barry Van Dusen

An artist who has created many of our covers, Barry Van Dusen lives in Princeton, Massachusetts, and is well known in the birding world. Barry has illustrated several nature books and pocket guides, and his articles and paintings have been featured in Birding, Bird Watcher’s Digest, and Yankee Magazine as well as Bird Observer. Barry’s interest in nature subjects began in 1982 with an association with the Massachusetts Audubon Society. He has been influenced by the work of European wildlife artists and has adopted their methodology of direct field sketching. Barry teaches workshops at various locations in Massachusetts. For more information, visit Barry’s website at <http://www.barryvandusen.com>.

A Guide to Birding Tillinghast Pond Management Area, West Greenwich, Rhode Island

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:14 GMT

Overview and History

The Tillinghast Pond Management Area (TPMA) in West Greenwich, Rhode Island, comprises 2,200 acres of land, with 13 miles of trails passing through diverse ecosystems such as forest, open upland, wetland, and pond habitats. TPMA is managed jointly by The Nature Conservancy (TNC), Rhode Island Department of Environmental Management (DEM), and the town of West Greenwich. You can access the trails from three main parking lots; all the trails interconnect at some point.

To get to TPMA from Interstate 95 in Rhode Island, take exit 14B toward RI-102 and West Greenwich. Merge onto RI-102. After 3.0 miles, turn left onto Plain Meeting House Road. After 3.5 miles, the parking lot at 600 Plain Meetinghouse Road will be on your left (41.6392, -71.7450). From this lot, you can access the Bates Loop; you can also reach the Flintlock Loop via Narrow Lane. There are no restrooms at this lot.

To get to the parking lot at 100 Plain Road, continue west on Plain Meeting House Road for another 0.4 mile. At the stop sign, turn right onto Plain Road. After 0.6 mile, turn right into the parking lot for TPMA (41.6450, -71.7568). From this lot, you can access the Pond Loop, Flintlock Loop, Logger’s Trail, and Coney Brook Loop. Restrooms are available at this lot.

To get to the parking lot at 150 Hazard Road, turn left onto Plain Road and backtrack for 0.2 mile, then turn right onto Seth Brown Road. After 0.9 mile, turn right onto Muddy Brook Road. You will pass a swamp along this road that can be good for Rusty Blackbirds in spring. Continue along Muddy Brook Road for 0.8 mile, then turn right at the stop sign onto Hazard Road. After 0.9 mile, the third parking lot for TPMA is on the right (41.6485, -71.7793), from which you can access the Shepard Trail and Coney Brook Loop. There are no restrooms at this lot.

Map of Tillinghurst Pond Management Area

An Update on the Lethal Threat that Windows Pose to Birds

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:13 GMT

Window-killed Yellow-throated Vireo below the patio door it hit in Henningsville, Berks County, Pennsylvania. Photograph by Peter G. Saenger.

My purpose is to update my review of bird-window collisions that was published in Bird Observer in 2006 (Klem 2006). Although that article is now dated, almost all of its content is still accurate and relevant. That work was my first review article, and since then I and others have offered updated versions (Klem 2009, 2010, 2014, 2021, Loss and O’Connell 2018, Basilio et al. 2020, de Wilde and Bleil de Souza 2022, Rossler et al. 2023). What follows is a short summary of the field’s history, our current knowledge, and work yet to be done.

My doctoral dissertation research on birds and windows was conducted from 1974 to 1979 (Klem 1979). Thus 2025 marks my 51st year of studying, writing, and teaching about the lethal threat posed to birds by clear and reflective sheet glass and plastic in the form of windows. Except for the results of the most current research, I comprehensively document the details of my studies and those of others in my 2021 book: Solid Air, Invisible Killer: Saving Billions of Birds from Windows (Klem 2021). The topic has gained legitimacy since the late 1970s, when I began a decade-long struggle to convince scientific journal editors that this conservation issue was important for birds and people. Since then well over 200 articles have been published on the topic in popular and scientific literature (Klem 2021, American Bird Conservancy 2024). Especially rewarding to me are the number of young scientists, prominent among them the research team at Oklahoma State University (Loss and O’Connell 2018), who have dedicated their talents to studying the details and dynamics of bird-window collisions.

First Modern Nesting Record for Red-Shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) on Martha’s Vineyard

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:12 GMT

An alert adult at the nest with the three chicks, all still completely covered in down, on May 26, 2024. All photographs by Wayne Smith, unless otherwise indicated.

Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus), an elegant, medium-sized raptor, is an unexciting find in most of Massachusetts. An adaptable bird as a breeder and as a transient, Red-shouldered hawk is relatively common in the Bay State—except, that is, on Cape Cod and the Massachusetts islands. The species is a scarce breeder and transient on the Cape and, in recent decades, has been virtually unheard of on Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket. The historical status of this species on Marthas Vineyard proves to be different, however. In this article, we describe successful breeding by a pair of Red-shouldered Hawks in West Tisbury, Martha’s Vineyard, during the spring and summer of 2024. As far as we can determine, this is the first documented instance of breeding by this species on Martha’s Vineyard in more than a century.

Whiting and Pesch (2007) consider Red-shouldered Hawk to be “a very rare migrant” on Martha’s Vineyard, “[with] only four sightings since 1954.” This assessment is seconded by Veit and Petersen (1993), who describe the species as “absent as breeders from Cape Cod and the Islands, with one exception [Nashawena Island, 1975].” This source characterizes Red-shouldered Hawks as “uncommon to rare on Cape Cod and the Islands” as migrants and points out “the species’ preference for lowland deciduous forests and swampy wetlands.” Dykstra et al. (2020) characterize the typical breeding habitat of eastern Red-shouldered Hawks as ranging from “bottomland hardwood, riparian areas, and flooded deciduous swamps to upland mixed deciduous-coniferous forest.” Moist habitats such as those that dominate this list are of limited extent on Martha’s Vineyard and quite different from the habitat chosen by our subject pair, which nested in dry mixed oak woodland on morainal hills, in an area with low-density residential development. The species may also, like some other soaring birds, have an aversion to crossing large expanses of water, which would limit the likelihood of Red-shouldered Hawks visiting the Vineyard as migrants or recolonizing the island following extirpation.

First Documented Nesting of Purple Martin (Progne subis) in Hampshire County, Massachusetts

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:11 GMT

The successful nesting pair at the Fort River USFWS in Hadley, MA, 2024. All photographs by the author.

Five Purple Martin nestlings, July 13, 2024.

In 2021, Andrew French, refuge manager at the Silvio O. Conte National Fish and Wildlife Refuge, put up a set of 12 nesting gourds for Purple Martins (Progne subis) at the Fort River branch in Hadley. A number of us in the birding community were puzzled, because we do not routinely get Purple Martins in Hampshire County. Veit and Petersen (1993) noted that cold rains in the summer of 1903 wiped out the swallow populations throughout Massachusetts, and although the smaller species recovered, martins did not. Bagg and Eliot (1937) summarized anecdotal records of Purple Martins in Hampshire and surrounding counties. They cited an observer stating that martins were “once very common in Amherst but now comparatively rare.” They are established locally at several sites in the eastern part of the state from Plum Island to Cape Cod, but no nesting records for Hampshire County exist on eBird (<http://www.ebird.org>, accessed 18 Feb 2025). We thought the endeavor at Fort River was doomed.

When several martins appeared that spring, we were excited and prepared to eat crow, but there was no evidence that they nested. The next year, the gourds were taken over by House Sparrows (Passer domesticus) and Tree Swallows (Tachycineta bicolor), and any martins that visited were aggressively excluded. In 2023, Theresa Gessing and I wrote a proposal to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to take over the management of the gourds. We planned to take the gourds down for the winter, clean them, plug them and store them on site, and put them up in the spring when the first martin scouts arrived. Two volunteers from Hampshire Bird Club—Jim Lafley and George Regmund—made three Tree Swallow nest boxes for us and installed them near the gourd site, and the Fish and Wildlife Service gave us a fourth box. The boxes were installed in March 2024 and we put the gourds back up, still plugged, in April.

Fourteenth Report of the Maine Bird Records Committee

Tue, 01 Apr 2025 00:00:10 GMT

Maine’s overdue first Anhinga was discovered at a beaver pond in Somerville. Photograph July 23, 2024, by Louis Bevier.

The Fourteenth report of the Maine Bird Records Committee (hereafter ME-BRC or the committee) summarizes 64 reports involving 34 species (plus one species pair) that were evaluated and decided during 2024. The committee accepted 52 records for an acceptance rate of 81%. Although most reports were recent, the years of occurrences ranged from 1971 to 2024.

Five new species were added to the state list: Anhinga (Anhinga anhinga), Ferruginous Hawk (Buteo regalis), Western Flycatcher (Empidonax difficilis), Hepatic Tanager (Piranga flava), and Spotted Towhee (Pipilo maculatus). Hoary Redpoll (Acanthis hornemanni) was removed since it is now considered conspecific with Redpoll (A. flammea). The total number of documented species on Maine’s state list is now 475. The official list of bird species recorded in Maine, our review procedures, and the list of members can be found at the committee’s website: <http://sites.google.com/site/mainebirdrecordscommittee>.

Records in this report are grouped by species; records accepted and those not accepted are listed within the same species account. Each record provides the location, county (italicized), date(s) of occurrence, names of observers or contributors, and committee record number. Documentation was provided by the observers listed or, in some cases, was obtained from publicly published websites. All reviewed materials and member comments are archived. If known, the names of finders are listed first and separated from other names by a semicolon. Photographic, video, or audio evidence reviewed is denoted by a dagger (†); written notes are denoted by an asterisk (*). As always, the committee strongly encourages written submissions even when there are photographs. Species accounts follow the current taxonomic classification and sequence adopted as of 2024 by the American Ornithological Society (list available at <http://checklist.americanornithology.org/taxa/>).