October 2025

Front Cover: October 2025

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:15 GMT

Hermit Thrush by John Sill © Massachusetts Audubon Society. Courtesy of the Museum of American Bird Art.

John Sill is a freelance wildlife artist living in the mountains of North Carolina. He was the illustrator for the Bird Identification Calendar for Mass Audubon for many years. His work has appeared in Birds In Art at the Leigh-Yawkey Woodson Art Museum, Wausau, Wisconsin, and in Art of the Animal Kingdom at the Bennington Center for the Arts in Vermont. He continues to illustrate the “About” and “About Habitats” series of natural history books for children written by his wife Cathryn.

Hot Birds: October 2025

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:14 GMT

Peter Flood, at his usual haunt on Race Point, spotted a Brown Booby feeding with a flock of gulls near shore on July 5. It was photographed again later that day, and twice on July 14 by people on whale watch boats offshore. The photograph is by Yiming Qiu.

Just after Hurricane Erin passed offshore, Erik Nielsen visited Gooseberry Neck near Westport and found several hundred terns of at least five species resting on the beach. One of them was a Bridled Tern. Erik was the only birder to enjoy this tropical visitor before it disappeared back into the masses of Common, Roseate, Forster’s, and Black terns. Erik Nielsen took the photograph.

The Bent of the River Audubon Center, Southbury, Connecticut

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:13 GMT

View from the Nature Center’s birding balcony. All photographs by Corrie Folsom-O’Keefe.

The Bent of the River Audubon Center, located in Southbury, Connecticut, comprises 700 acres of diverse habitats: woodlands, meadows, shrublands, wetlands, and a one–mile stretch of the Pomperaug River. Located just to the east of the Housatonic River, the Bent of the River’s woodlands are a mix of deciduous and coniferous trees. The coniferous hillsides, mostly white pines and hemlocks, attract bird species that are more common to the Center’s north, and the deciduous lowlands and shrubland fields support species more typical of southern Connecticut.

A recognized Important Bird Area, Bent of the River’s variety of habitats allows for tremendous diversity of nesting species. Eighteen species of warblers have been recorded in the nesting season. Sizable populations of Blue-winged Warbler and Indigo Bunting nest here (more than 20 pairs of each species), as well as populations of several other early successional species of greatest conservation need, including American Woodcock, Black-billed Cuckoo, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Eastern Kingbird, Prairie Warbler, Eastern Towhee, and Field Sparrow (CT.gov 2015). The deciduous woodlands host healthy populations of several species of greatest conservation need, including Veery, Wood Thrush, Black-and-white Warbler, Louisiana Waterthrush, Scarlet Tanager, and Rose-breasted Grosbeak (CT.gov 2015).

The Bent of the River’s shrubland fields—nearly 90 acres— are what make this sanctuary exceptional. The shrubland and meadow habitats are considered early successional. That means they are young, regenerating forest. Typically, a meadow will grow into a shrubland and then into a forest over time if left alone. This process is natural, but these early successional habitats are becoming scarce in Connecticut due to human development, loss of farming, and forest regeneration.

Map of Bent of the River Reservation.

Sixth Report of the Rhode Island Avian Records Committee

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:12 GMT

American Flamingo, Briggs Marsh, Little Compton, Newport County, RI; August 11, 2024. Photograph by Peter Modest.

For this report, the Rhode Island Avian Records Committee (RIARC) welcomed two new members, Alan Kneidel and Sam Miller. They take the places of Peter Paton and Doug Wilson, whom we thank for their years of service and expertise. This report presents an evaluation of 61 records. These records were primarily from 2022 but also included two records from 2021, a re-review of a previously accepted record from 2006, and two records from 2024 and 2025 that received expedited review. Highlights include Rhode Island’s first Tundra Bean-Goose and American Flamingo, its first fully documented record of Common Gull (Larus canus canus/heinei), and subspecific resolution of a record of Larus canus kamtschatschensis from 2006 (previously accepted as Mew Gull: RIARC 2006-3, Mitra et al. 2010). Other highlights include the state’s second Gray Kingbird and a historic spring incursion of Arctic Terns.

The records are grouped by species, with each species entry followed by four numbers in parentheses (a, b, c, d), defined as follows:

a	the number of records cited by Howe and Sturtevant (1899).
b	the number of records accepted from 1900–2002. This number is derived from Ferren (2024), the Checklist of Rhode Island Birds (Rhode Island Ornithological Club 2002), Conway (1992), and records accepted by a pre-RIARC committee of reviewers for Field Notes of Rhode Island Birds through 2002 (Raithel 2001, 2002). The symbol “++” represents relatively frequent historical occurrence of the species, which could be replaced with a number pending ongoing research.
c	the number of accepted records from 2003–2021, including those published in RIARC’s five previous reports (Mitra et al. 2010, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024), plus additional records from that period published in the present report.
d	the number of accepted records from 2022—or more recently, in the case of records receiving expedited review—published in the present report.

The sum of a, b, c, and d represents the total number of verified records in Rhode Island through December 2022.

For each record below, we list the RIARC report number; the vote of the Committee (accept–not accept); the number of individual birds reported; the location; the date(s) of occurrence; and the observer(s), with the following codes: I (initial finder), R (reported details), P (obtained photograph), and A (obtained audio recording).

Status of the Mew Gull Complex in Massachusetts: Special 28th Report of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee (MARC)

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:10 GMT

Common Gull (Larus canus canus)—Ringer—and Short-billed Gull (Larus brachyrhynchus) together at Sandy Beach, Cohasset, MA; April 15, 2018. Photograph by Marshall J. Iliff. https://macaulaylibrary.org/asset/94808371

Mew Gull (Larus canus) has been known as a vagrant to Massachusetts ever since the first specimen was collected in Chatham in 1908. By 1857, its four distinct populations had been described, but reliable field marks for identification to subspecies level remained extremely poorly known until the 1980s. Veit and Petersen (1993) categorized the records of Mew Gulls in Massachusetts by subspecies—L. c. canus and L c. brachyrhynchus—and by distinct seasonal patterns. Only in the past decade or two, with advances in digital photography, have North American birders been fully equipped to identify and document the various taxa in the Mew Gull complex. In the process, a more complicated and interesting picture has taken shape in Massachusetts and along the Northeast coast.