Weekly Bird Report
The Weekly Bird Report with Mark Faherty can be heard every Wednesday on WCAI, the local NPR station for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and the South Coast. Mark has been the Science Coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary since August 2007 and has led birding trips for Mass Audubon since 2002. He is past president of the Cape Cod Bird Club and current member of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee.
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This has been one of those rare weeks where enough happened to fuel several weeks of bird reports — a spring nor’easter that poured rare seabirds into Cape Cod Bay, a colony of at least five apparently nesting Swallow-tailed Kites in Mashpee that also shattered the state high count, and, most importantly, the cuteness overload of baby owls fledging in my very own yard. -
Rebekah Ambrose was asking for help identifying a bird she photographed in Barnstable, and her photos showed the first-ever Anhinga for the Cape and Islands. -
After a bleak winter, and a reluctant, rainy spring, we Cape and Islands year-rounders deserve a flowery and mild May. -
While the turn of the calendar to May brings an avalanche of phenological change to yards and woods, maybe none is so obvious, and welcome, as the change in the morning soundscape. -
It’s not even May, and the “Swallow-tailed Kite triangle” of Cape Cod is already popping off with early sightings. There were no fewer than five reports of this improbably graceful hawk over the last week. -
Let’s talk about everyone’s favorite garden accessory, the Ruby-throated Hummingbird. Quite a few have been reported already, with the first sighted back on the 17th in Brewster. -
It’s a classic birding bummer — sometimes a rare bird comes to light too late for birders to see it, to the chagrin of those who missed out. -
On Sunday, a rare bird was discovered on Great Pond in Eastham, driving local birders loony. This unassuming gray and white waterbird was in the wrong kind of water in the wrong town on the wrong coast. -
This year it turned out that, as I was heading to Florida, Florida was heading to Cape Cod. As soon as I got down there I saw the rare bird alert from back home blowing up with Florida birds, most of which I didn’t even see while I was in Florida. -
March may come in like a lion, but around here it goes out on the crooked wings of an Osprey.
