December 2025

Hot Birds: December 2025

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:16 GMT

Massachusetts’s most exciting bird this Fall had to be the Roseate Spoonbill, only the second state record. First noticed October 15 in Marshfield, it spent the next day there, then traveled a few miles to Duxbury beach on October 17 for its final appearance. Brian Vigorito took the photograph.

After the BBC’s August overnight pelagic was canceled due to rough seas, a replacement trip was scheduled for September. It was memorable, featuring a migration fallout that included 17 warbler species, as well as eight species of cetacean. The single rarest bird sighting was a Barolo Shearwater, the eighth Massachusetts record if accepted by the MARC. Max Chalfin-Jacobs took the photograph.

Twenty-ninth Report of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:11 GMT

Photographed on a whale watch near Gloucester, this Juan Fernandez Petrel represented just the third for the United States, the first for the Atlantic Basin, and joins a series of surprising Pacific seabirds spotted in the Atlantic. Photograph by Andy Sanford.

For its Twenty-ninth Report, the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee (MARC) evaluated 213 records involving 82 taxa. The committee accepted 188 and did not accept 25. This report covers records from 1980 through mid-2025. Four species were added to the state list based on new records: Ferruginous Hawk, Vega Gull, Juan Fernandez Petrel, and Varied Bunting. Taxonomic changes—and the review of a new record—resulted in the addition of Eurasian Whimbrel. See below for more information on these and other changes to taxonomy and nomenclature affecting the state list. After these changes, the state list totals 524 species. In addition, Cape Verde/Desertas Petrel joins Apus sp. and Streaked/Sulphur-bellied Flycatcher as the third non-species taxon admitted to the state list.

Further highlights include the state’s second accepted Western Wood-Pewee; third Cape Verde/Desertas Petrel; fourth records for Anhinga and Western Flycatcher; fifth records for Vermilion Flycatcher, Gray Kingbird, and Western Meadowlark; sixth records for Crested Caracara, Sage Thrasher, and Spotted Towhee; and a notable influx of White Ibises. The first two records of the high Arctic subspecies of Black Guillemot, Cepphus grylle mandtii, were also accepted. Additional context is provided for select species below.

Species taxonomy, nomenclature, and sequence follow the eBird/Clements Checklist (v2025), which closely follows the seventh edition of the American Ornithological Society (AOS, formerly American Ornithologists’ Union) Check-list of North American Birds (AOU 1998) and its supplements, up to and including the one published this year (Chesser et al. 2025a, b). Note that the changes listed last year that had yet to be ratified by the AOS all were adopted with the 2025 supplement. Taxonomic revisions in 2025 included (* = not yet adopted by AOS):

Photo Essay: Birds of the Twenty-ninth MARC Report

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:10 GMT

This bird’s darker eye and mantle, bright pink legs, along with a faint “string of pearls” on the inner primaries visible in-flight shots, confirmed its identification as the state’s first Vega Gull. Photograph by Jeremiah Trimble.

A Varied Bunting visiting a feeder in Provincetown represented not only a first for Massachusetts, but also the first winter record for the entire East Coast. Photograph by Peter Trimble.

About Books: We Were Nature Once

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:07 GMT

The Story of Nature: A Human History.
Jeremy Mynott. 2024. New Haven, Connecticut and London, U.K.: Yale University Press.

“The Greeks invented the idea of nature. They had a word for it.” (p. 62)

“All the facts of natural history taken by themselves have no value, but are barren, like a single sex. But marry it to history and it is full of life.” (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836), quoted in The Story of Nature.)

I grew up in the fifties in Watertown, Massachusetts. Even though we lived close to Boston, and closer still to Cambridge, wildlife, of a kind, was all around me. DeKay’s brown snakes (Storeria dekayi) bred in trashy areas of empty lots on my street and in our school park. One of the earliest photos of me as a toddler shows me covered with a number of snakes playfully draped there by my brothers. Bats always seemed to get into our third-floor apartment. On summer nights, fireflies flitted around our small garden. Down my street a few blocks was the Charles River. I got to see the herring and smelt runs despite the horrific pollution. I was always bringing home a green frog or snapping turtle to keep over winter and then release in spring.

My two older brothers dealt with what was called a “reptile farm” in Texas. They would order stuff without telling my parents. The result was that my small home was also host to numerous alligator lizards, horned toads, and anoles that inevitably got loose from their terrariums and vanished. They would make their presence eventually known, usually at inconvenient times. We had family trips and vacations to Plum Island and Cape Cod, and I became familiar with horseshoe crabs, egrets, greenheads, and puffer fish.

Besides escaped herps, my apartment was also full of books that helped me identify what I saw. These included many volumes of the Golden Guides and a number of fascinating older natural history books. I loved pouring over the pages of these books and dreaming of seeing something exotic. Today my neighborhood has been developed, and all the lots and most of the gardens and fruit trees are gone. I doubt I could turn up a DeKay’s anywhere near there now. I’m sure the fireflies are absent.

At a Glance: December 2025

Mon, 01 Dec 2025 00:00:03 GMT

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