October 2026

Hot Birds: October 2026

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:14 GMT

The rarest bird in the state during the past couple of months was probably also the least seen. Rick Heil photographed a Virginia’s Warbler at Spencer Peirce Little Farm, Newbury, on September 7. The bird played 15 minutes of hide-and-seek with Rick, flitting through the vegetation and allowing just one identifiable photo, then disappeared and was never relocated. Rick’s photo is above.

A Crested Caracara was one of the tourists spending summer vacation on Cape Cod. It was first spotted flying past Race Point, Provincetown, on July 11, and a few birders saw it nearby on July 12. A month and a half passed without further sightings until a caracara was photographed at Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary on August 27. It vanished again, then turned up at Duck Harbor, Wellfleet, where it continued to be seen through press time. Keegan Burke took the photograph.

Mark Braatz found a flock of 11 Black-bellied Whistling-Ducks incongruously walking around a residential neighborhood in Beverly on August 9. They were relocated later that day on a pond at Kernwood Country Club, and a crowd of birders gathered to admire them from the nearest road. The flock turned out to be a one-day wonder. Margo Goetschkes took the photograph.

Seventh Report of the Rhode Island Avian Records Committee

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:11 GMT

Tropical Kingbird, Albro Woods Preserve, Middletown, Newport County, RI; October 18–22, 2024. Photograph by Louise Ruggeri.

The Seventh Report of the Rhode Island Avian Records Committee (RIARC) presents evaluations of 106 reports involving 52 species from 2023 and 2024. Note that reports of Tundra Bean-Goose from 2025 and American Flamingo from 2024 received expedited review and were published in our Sixth Report (Mitra et al. 2025).

Highlights of the present report include many exceptional records for Rhode Island:

First records of Mottled Duck, Tropical Kingbird, and Western Flycatcher.
Second records of Siberian Sand-Plover, Common Gull, and Bell’s Vireo (and also its third).
Third records of Calliope Hummingbird, Green-tailed Towhee, and Townsend’s Warbler (and also its fourth and fifth).
Fourth records of White-winged Dove, Northern Lapwing, and Townsend’s Solitaire.

Other notable events included incursions of Thick-billed Murres during both winters and Cave Swallows in November 2024.

In other news, the Committee voted to add three species to the Review List: American Avocet, Tricolored Heron, and Northern Shrike. The first has occurred rarely but regularly over the past 60 years, with 12 records enumerated by Conway (1992) from the first in 1968 through 1991. At some point thereafter, this species lost its status as a “back of the card” vagrant on the Checklist of Rhode Island Birds (Rhode Island Ornithological Club 2002) and was omitted from the original Review List, in part due to its distinctiveness. The latter two species formerly occurred much more frequently but have diminished significantly in recent years. In each case, review seemed appropriate, and the Committee will explore the feasibility of retroactively reviewing records back through 2003 for our next report.

Reports not accepted by the Committee are not published here unless they were submitted to the Committee with the observers’ expressed intention that they be reviewed or in certain cases where records have become well-known through public discussion.

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 2003–2022, including those published in RIARC’s six previous reports (Mitra et al. 2010, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025), plus additional records from that period published in the current report (none in the present case).

d the number of accepted records from 2023 and 2024, published in the current report.

The sum of a, b, c, and d represents the total number of verified records in Rhode Island through December 2024. For each record below, we list the RIARC report number; the vote of the Committee (accept–not accept); the number of individual birds reported (provided only if the number is greater than one); the location, including town; 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). Reports from multiple observers indicated by “mob.”

About Books: Science, Art, and Birds

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:06 GMT

Birds Up Close: An Engineer Explores Their Hidden Wonders.

Lorna Gibson. 2026. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Birds. The Goldfinch, Birds, Art and Us

Simon Schama and Martine Gosselink. 2026. The Hague, Netherlands: The Mauritshuis/Hannibal Books.

Here are two new books that present two unique views of birds. In one, you will find a very deep dive into the physics of birds and, in the other, a multimedia meditation on what birds mean to humans.

“Birds are amazing.” (p. ix Birds Up Close)

Who would have thought that a hummingbird draws nectar into its mouth using a pump action created by the interplay between the surface tension of the nectar and the springiness of the fringes on its tongue? A wonderful discovery. (p. 113 Birds Up Close)

Have you ever watched a chickadee in deep winter and wondered how that little ball of fluff is staying warm? Looking at the brilliant deep blue of a male indigo bunting, have you considered where that color comes from? One of the most common bird questions is, of course, how do woodpeckers escape fatal brain damage? All of those questions, and many more, are answered in the brilliant new book Birds Up Close by Lorna Gibson.

Lorna Gibson is the Matoula S. Salapatas Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and a MacVicar Faculty Fellow at MIT. She grew up in Britain, where family trips to places including the Niagara Escarpment and the Farne Islands, gave her a real passion for nature. She became a classic science nerd at an early age. Her focus of graduate research was “the mechanical properties of materials with a porous, cellular structure like honeycombs and foams.” (p. xviii) This remains her special field of interest to this day. She moved to Massachusetts in 1984 and took a faculty position at MIT. This background sounds like it would make her just about the last person who would write a fascinating book about birds. But she came across that question about how woodpeckers don’t injure their skulls and brains despite battering hard wood with their bills.

With all this pecking, how do woodpeckers avoid brain injury? For a long time, people thought that woodpeckers had a special, foam-like material between their brains and their skulls, a little like the padding in a bicycle helmet. Because the mechanics of foams is my research specialty, when I heard about this, I had to find out more. I discovered that in the 1970s a group of neurologists interested in human brain injury had dissected the head of a pale-billed woodpecker—only to find that there was no special foamy material protecting the brain. (p. 104)

She consulted colleagues, did some thorough research, and produced a paper. From that serendipitous beginning, she decided to write a more extensive book on the materials science view of some of the most unique aspects of birds.

At a Glance: October 2026

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:02 GMT

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Thu, 01 Oct 2026 00:00:01 GMT