Words On Birds 06-05-26

 

     As I mentioned last week, the spring bird migration is slowing to a crawl. The last of the warblers, flycatchers and shorebirds are moving through our area in early June. Some of these birds may stay and nest while many will still continue further north to northern New England and Canada. 

 

     Our summer resident birds are settling in and many are well on their way to nesting and producing offspring. Some will have single broods and longer nesting cycles while others may have two or three broods during the summer. Their surviving offspring will then join them in the fall for the return trip to their wintering grounds as far south as Central or South America.

 

     The spring migration month of May started slow, with colder weather and more northerly winds hampering birds travel through New England. Onshore winds pushed more birds to our west. But by mid-month we had a few good migration days with southwest winds bringing more birds to the “migrant traps” along the coast. 

 

     Then May ended with an exclamation point. A strong nor’easter hit us last Friday night and Saturday with high winds downing trees and branches, and a strong ocean surge that drove higher tides into our coastal beaches, bays and rivers. As the storm started to abate on Saturday morning, it left behind a lot of debris, erosion, and birds!

 

     Hundreds, if not thousands of birds that had been migrating offshore were pushed in off the ocean overnight and deposited onto coastal beaches and marshes from Cape Cod to New Hampshire. Locally, hundreds of phalaropes – small pelagic “shorebird-like” birds, found themselves in the shelter of the salt pannes of Plum Island. Birders on the refuge that morning reported numbers of red-necked phalaropes in the main pannes and further down the island in the pannes before Cross Farm Hill. These phalaropes are usually only seen far out in the ocean from a boat.

 

     Birders also found shorebirds taking refuge in the grasses of the south marsh between the Pine Trail and Cross Farm Hill. Black-bellied plovers, red knots, short-billed dowitchers, semipalmated sandpipers and semipalmated plovers were found there.

 

     As birders made their way to Sandy Point, they discovered hundreds of terns roosting near Emerson Rocks and also on the southwesterly side of Sandy Point. The birds were trying to stay out of the wind, which was subsiding a bit, but was still brisk into early afternoon.

 

     Among the common and least terns were several black terns which were on their way to nest in Maine or southern Canada. We sometimes see black terns that stop to feed on their way north or south during migration. Many are in non-breeding plumage when we see them later in summer and fall, but these were in their breeding plumage – snazzy black head and body and dark gray wings.

 

     Most amazing were the tens of Arctic terns that were there. Arctic terns are long distance migrants and fly over water from Antarctica to the Arctic each spring. Most fly non-stop, so we seldom get to see them on land unless they are blown in, like in this storm. 

 

     This amazing bird flies up to 44,000 miles in a year, going back and forth from Antarctica and the Arctic. In the fall, they follow the winds and go by way of Europe and Africa before heading south to Antarctica. They even sleep in flight! These terns were fully awake and they were great to see.