August 2021

Front Cover: August 2021

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:17 GMT

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: August 2021

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:16 GMT

The first White-faced Ibis in the state this year was a Tax Day surprise for Sue Walas, who photographed it near Fairhaven on April 15. Next came the anticipated annual appearances in Essex County: the first in Ipswich near New England BioLabs April 17–24, then a second in Newbury near Scotland Road May 14–20. Shilo McDonald took the photo above.

A couple of birders who visited Mount Auburn Cemetery on April 19, before most of the warblers had even started to arrive, were richly rewarded when a Townsend’s Solitaire showed up. The vast majority of Massachusetts records of this western thrush appear in the fall; only a handful have been found in the spring. Clara Easter took the photo above.

Sean Williams picked the right morning to bring his Holy Cross ornithology students to Parker River NWR, where they discovered a Reeve and Ruff together in one of the Salt Pannes. The one-day-wonder pair were enjoyed by several birders until they disappeared late that afternoon. Another Ruff made a briefer appearance at Mass Audubon’s Allens Pond Sanctuary on June 29, showing up just long enough to be photographed in flight by Joel Eckerson. The photo is above.

Birding the Paper City: Holyoke, Massachusetts

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:15 GMT

Call me Elizur. What do you think of when someone mentions the City of Holyoke? Paper mills, canals, the massive hydroelectric dam and fish lift, the mall, the old ski area and amusement park, ethnic diversity, and Nick’s Nest hot dogs come to mind. Crime, of course. Mount Holyoke College? Nope, that’s in South Hadley, but it does have Holyoke Community College. You might be surprised to know Holyoke is the birthplace of volleyball and home of the Volleyball Hall of Fame. It should also be the rightful birthplace of basketball, according to my friend, the late Clara Gabler, whose father, George, introduced a certain James Naismith to a game of throwing a ball into a peach basket at the Holyoke YMCA six years before Naismith honed the sport (Wheeler 1986). Birds? Probably not. Yet on spring migration counts, I can routinely tally over 100 species, sometimes in the 120s if the timing and weather are favorable.

Holyoke has a rich history of planning and development (Connecticut Valley Historical Society 1881, Wikipedia 2021). First explored by Elizur Holyoke in the 1650s, the settlement of “Ireland Parrish” would take nearly 200 years to become the township of Holyoke in 1850. The town chose its name from the Mount Holyoke Range, which Elizur had named after himself during his 1660 survey of the northern boundary of Springfield, what is now South Hadley. Rolland Thomas flanked Elizur on the west side of the river—the future Holyoke—naming that range Mount Thomas. Elizur’s 1653 survey on the west side resulted in the establishment of Northampton.

Figure 1. Northern Holyoke Overview Map.

Eleven Years of Birding at Halibut Point State Park, Rockport, Massachusetts

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:14 GMT

Frozen quarry, April 2015. All photographs by the author.

I started leading bird walks at Rockport’s Halibut Point State Park in 2003 with Greg Pronevitz, as a summer complement to the walks led in the winter months by John Nove, the park’s visitor services supervisor. The park is centered on a large quarry that was used until the collapse of the Cape Ann granite industry in 1929. The Trustees of Reservations acquired 12 acres in 1929 and created Halibut Point Reservation in 1934. What is now the visitor center was built as a fire control tower for coastal defense against German U-boats during World War II. The state purchased 56 acres in 1981 to create the park. It is a popular park, with recent renovations designed to increase parking, ease visitor access, and provide a modernized visitor center.

A brochure of “Summer 2004 Programs” listed my walks on June 20, July 18, and August 15 from 8:00 am to 10:00 am, starting what eventually became the pattern of park-sponsored walks on the third Sunday of the month. Thanks to Ramona Latham, then with The Trustees, the walks became year-round in 2009, only skipping December because the Christmas Bird Count for Cape Ann is also on the third Sunday. The Brookline Bird Club began listing these walks as Beginner Bird Walks after The Trustees stopped having scheduled events at their properties on Cape Ann.

A First for Nantucket Island, Massachusetts: Breeding Common Ravens

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:13 GMT

One of the adult ravens flies from the water tower to Low Beach to collect a piece of rabbit carcass. All photos by Skyler Kardell.

Editor’s Note: For Bird Observer online, click on the underscored dates to see the eBird reports.

For a number of years, Common Raven (Corvus corvax)—along with Eastern Screech-Owl (Megascops asio) and Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus)—was put on a short list of birds that can be found on the mainland but are absent from Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket Island. Prior to 2019, there was only one confirmed record of Common Raven for Nantucket County—a bird seen and photographed by several observers at the Milestone Cranberry Bogs on February 22, 2014. Coincidentally, the second documented record for the island was found less than a mile away from the bogs on August 18, 2019. The prospect of ravens breeding on Nantucket was laughable then. Yet that is the reality in 2021.

Ravens had disappeared in Massachusetts by the early twentieth century, having lost much of their former range in New England due to clear-cutting for agriculture among other causes, and did not reappear until the 1940s (Boarman and Heinrich 2020). It would take another 30 years for the species to populate the Northeast again. At the time of publication of The Birds of Massachusetts in 1993, the status of Common Raven in the eastern part of the state was rare, although it bred in western Massachusetts (Veit and Peterson 1993). By 2013, the Massachusetts Breeding Bird Atlas 2 reported ravens present and breeding statewide—except for Cape Cod and the Islands (Walsh and Petersen 2013). The species’ expansion into the coastal plain is still a recent phenomenon. Only within the last decade have ravens returned to Cape Cod (eBird 2013–2021), where in the early seventeenth century, pilgrim colonizers had reported them as numerous (Veit and Petersen 1993).

Musings from the Blind Birder: The Return of Birdsong: One Birder’s Experience with Hearing Aids

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:11 GMT

Blackpoll Warbler. Photograph by “WarblerLady.” (https://flickr.com/photos/warblerlady/8482742795/). (CC BY-ND 2.0)

Alvin and I were walking on a rural road near our Vermont home on a cool, late May morning when I heard a short, weak song from my left. Listening for several minutes, I was not sure which bird was singing it. I pulled out my phone and recorded the song to play later to my husband, Bob Stymeist. Alvin and I continued walking until Bob came by in the car on his way to the town transfer station and picked us up. I told him about the bird and played the recording back to him before we started off. Despite amplification of the song from the recording, Bob could not hear the bird. I asked if he had his hearing aids on, to which he replied no, as he was just planning to go to the transfer station and return home. We chuckled, shook our heads, and reminded ourselves again that if you are a birder, it is best never to leave home without your binoculars or, in this case, your hearing aids.

Back at the house, Bob easily heard the song from the phone’s recording after he put his hearing aids on. It was another striking example of how much benefit the hearing aids have been to Bob in the past few years. As we age, many of us start to lose our ability to hear the higher-pitched, or high-frequency, sounds where many bird songs, particularly those of warblers, reside. We may retain for a much longer time excellent hearing in the frequency range of human speech and may not realize that hearing aids could benefit us for specific situations, such as birding, even if most of the time we do not need them. Because birding is so much a function of using what you hear to locate a bird and thus have the opportunity to see it, the loss of the ability to hear birds is a profound one for older birders.

Field Notes: A Hybrid Mourning Warbler x Common Yellowthroat in Leicester, Massachusetts

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:10 GMT

Hybrid Mourning Warbler x Common Yellowthroat. Photograph by the author.

I visited some shrubby woodlands in Leicester near the Worcester Regional Airport on May 16, 2021, looking for migrants and scarce breeders in the successional shrubland habitat. I crossed a streambed with Spiraea and tussocks of sedges and noticed a small warbler foraging silently near the ground. Immediately I thought “Mourning” by a combination of structure and the way it was using its tail. However, upon seeing the bird, it first looked like a Common Yellowthroat in plumage, with a clear black mask extending well down into the malar and auricular area, outlined with frosty gray.

Rather than the more striking features visible in the photograph, the first characteristics that I noticed were off were the bright yellow flanks and oddly large tail. Then I noticed that the black splotchy areas on the breast were not bits of mud but rather a plumage feature. These were the partial bib of a Mourning Warbler. At this point, I also noticed that the extent of the gray on the head was abnormal for a Common Yellowthroat. With the combination of the partial bib and the frosty gray on the head, I realized this was probably a Mourning x Yellowthroat and began to take photos. I didn’t get a well-lit look at the bird’s throat and breast until after I realized it was something interesting and switched to my camera.

Field Notes: Group Bathing by Willets

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:09 GMT

Figure 1. Two Willets are bathing, one is fluffing its feathers and the other three are between preening bouts. All photographs by the author.

During March and April 2020, my wife and I were in a rental home at 1455 Long Beach Drive, Big Pine Key, Florida, where I was able to record and photograph the bathing habits of Willets (Tringa semipalmata) on numerous occasions. The house was on the ocean side and provided an opportunity to watch shorebird behavior in the shallow water and beach wrack. I had reported on a group of five Willets, in a flock of about 150, group bathing at the Ding Darling National Wildlife Refuge on Sanibel Island, Florida, but did not describe or photograph the behavior in detail (Davis 2016). Our stay on Big Pine Key offered an opportunity to more thoroughly examine and document the bathing practices of Willets. I recorded my observations in a journal and, when possible, photographed these events. What follows are descriptions taken from my journal notes of the bathing events I witnessed.

On March 26, 2020, at 4:00 pm, I was watching White Ibises (Eudocimus albus) foraging in the back of our house and at 4:55 p.m. a single White Ibis began bathing in a pool past a small mangrove. Seven minutes later a Willet approached the bathing Ibis and began bathing itself. The power of suggestion in birds to join a bathing bird seems remarkable. On March 29 at 5:06 pm, I watched a bathing Willet duck its head under water, then fluff and flap its partially opened wings, its body partially immersed. It bathed for six minutes and then stood and preened for nine minutes before flying to shore where it preened for an additional five minutes. A second Willet also bathed. The following day at 4:55 pm, a pair of Willets preened, and one scratched its chin. One bird put its head completely under the water and brought it up splashing water onto its back and closed wings; then it bathed, submerging most of its body and fluffing and flapping its partially opened wings. It preened again from 4:59 to 5:06 pm and then walked away. The second Willet also bathed and preened.

About Books: We Used to Think…

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:08 GMT

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds.
Scott Weidensaul. 2021. New York, New York: W.W. Norton & Company.

“You know what bothers me about scientists?” my mother asked some years ago. “They always say we used to think, but now we know.” (p. 99)

We may finally be looking at migratory birds the way they should be viewed—not as residents of any one place, but of the whole. These are creatures whose entire life cycles must be understood if we are to have a prayer of preserving them against the onslaught they face at every moment, and at every step, of their migration journey. (p. 14)

Avian migration is one of the most spectacular natural wonders that we enjoy every year in New England. Every spring, summer, and fall we can bear witness to mass movements of birds as many thousands of land birds, water birds, and pelagic species pass through our forests, shores, and seas on their way to their breeding or wintering grounds. All you have to do is get yourself to some well-known migration hotspot, of which there are many in New England, and lift up your binoculars. I have seen movements of nighthawks and raptors even from my front walk in the city of Worcester. Though many of us have read details of some of the spectacular migratory flights of species such as Arctic Tern, how many of us have really deeply grasped how incredible migratory journeys are? For many birders, migration means a time to tick uncommon species that do not breed here, but how many of you have been awed by the incredible journey that even the common Red-eyed Vireo makes twice a year?

Bygone Birds: Historical Highlights for March-April

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:06 GMT

5 YEARS AGO

March–April 2016

Three White-faced Ibises—a new high count for the state—were in Ipswich in April. Up to two Mew Gulls were present at Race Point in March. Four Yellow-throated Warblers were reported, with the earliest found on March 27. The Mountain Bluebird in Falmouth continued until March 22. Yellow-headed Blackbirds were reported from Cumberland Farms and West Harwich.

Best sighting: the first-for-Massachusetts Yellow-billed Loon continued at Race Point, Provincetown, from February 27 until April 2 and was accompanied by up to two Pacific Loons, allowing some observers to experience a “four loon day.”

10 YEARS AGO

March–April 2011

An Eared Grebe was found in Chatham on March 26. A White-faced Ibis that was discovered at Plum Island on April 22 ended its visit (and its life) in the talons of a Peregrine Falcon. A Mississippi Kite was spotted over Truro on April 23. A Mew Gull continued in Lynn until March 8. The three Monk Parakeets were adding nesting material to their East Boston home in April. A Scissor-tailed Flycatcher was a one-day wonder on Plum Island on April 29. The Harris’s Sparrow continued on Duxbury Beach until April 28. Four Hoary Redpolls were identified among the many large redpoll flocks during this period.

Best sighting: five Black-bellied Whistling Ducks in Duxbury on April 29 represented the second state record.

At a Glance: June 2021 Revealed

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:05 GMT

WAYNE R. PETERSEN

This issue’s mystery species is obviously a tiny bird, a fact suggested by its fine pointed bill, slender legs, and size compared to the twigs and blossoms also visible in the picture. When the picture is viewed online, the bird’s bright yellow underparts clearly suggest that the bird is probably a wood warbler of some sort, and few other tiny, pointy-billed birds are as prominently streaked on the breast as the mystery species. Among the alternative possibilities might be such petite species as wrens, kinglets, and gnatcatchers; however, all of these birds are plain breasted and none of them exhibits prominent yellow underparts.

Knowing that the mystery bird is a wood warbler at once narrows the field, and the presence of conspicuous streaks on the bird’s sides, but not on its breast, is an important clue. When combined with the distinct dark spot on the side of the bird’s lower neck, noticeable stripe over its eye, and obvious wing bars, the identification is readily clinched as a Prairie Warbler (Setophaga discolor). Although various other wood warblers are streaked below—e.g., Magnolia, Cape May, Palm—in these species the breast streaks extend across the midbreast and are in some cases less prominent than those exhibited by the mystery bird. Plus, all the other species fail to show the dark spot on the lower neck that is present in the Prairie Warbler and is obvious on the mystery warbler. The light gray face and nape are also frequently characteristic of this species in autumn.

At a Glance: August 2021

Sun, 01 Aug 2021 00:00:04 GMT

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