Weekly Bird Report
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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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1 day ago
Hurricane Lee postgame bird analysis
Hurricane, then Tropical Storm, then “Post-Tropical Cyclone” Lee has come and gone. Lee barely grazed us with some ho-hum 50 mph gusts that downed a few trees, having passed well to our east. But how did it score in storm-birding terms?
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Sep 13, 2023
The visitors that Hurricane Lee could bring
Birders are all secretly hoping Lee comes, and that Lee is bringing lots of gifts in the form of rare, storm-blown birds.
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Sep 6, 2023
Fascinating Monomoy
Hundreds of thousands of shorebirds and seabirds breed, feed, and rest on Chatham’s barrier beaches. Importantly for these ISS surveys, thousands of normally kinetic shorebirds take a break from feeding to rest in certain parts of Monomoy during the high tide, at which point they are relatively easy to count.
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Aug 30, 2023
Fall bird migration is a quiet affair
Fall migration is an Irish goodbye – by the time you notice you’re not hearing the catbirds anymore, they’ve been gone two weeks.
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Aug 16, 2023
Rare avian visitors worth noting
Rhode Island is no slouch in the rare bird game - places like the Charlestown Breachway, Napatree Point, and Block Island have produced many a rarity that sent Massachusetts birders speeding down I-95.
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Aug 9, 2023
Learn more about those fuzzy and efficient workaholics: Bees
I highly recommend paying attention to the bees visiting your yard. Just like with birding, you never know what you may find. Some tiny bees I noticed visiting male winterberry at Wellfleet Bay sanctuary last month turned out to be armored resin bees, a group never before recorded on the Cape and Islands.
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Aug 2, 2023
Shorebirds worth noticing
As we round the corner of mid-summer, with Labor Day now dimly visible at the horizon, it’s time you got serious about shorebirds.
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Jul 26, 2023
A different kind of plover is very far from home
The bird was indeed a plover, but not the one they were tasked with watching. This was a Mountain Plover, a scarce species of the high, dry plains east of the rockies, and one that eluded me thus far in my birding career.
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Jul 13, 2023
Birds to look out for when you’re whale watching
It’s now high season for that traditional tourist activity, the whale watch. Us jaded locals probably don’t take advantage of this activity enough, though we live in one of just a handful of places in North America where it’s easy to see whales close to land.
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Jul 5, 2023
Tern tern tern
It’s summertime on the Cape’s beaches, which for me always brings to mind that famous old song about seabirds – Tern! Tern! Tern! At least I assume it’s about the seabirds – it’s by the Byrds, after all.
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Jun 28, 2023
A large mammal whose lifestyle benefits birds
This past weekend, the wife and I packed up the kids and headed west, bound for adventure in the exotic lands beyond the bridges. As much as I love the Cape, I need to head to places with richer woods and bigger wildlife now and again.
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Jun 21, 2023
Watching the youngest generation emerge
In the birding calendar, late June is a great time to sit back, relax and watch some chicks.
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Jun 14, 2023
June rarities in the bird world
Last week, full of foolish confidence, I declared that migration was over. This week’s report is about various migrants that are still passing through.
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Jun 7, 2023
The sounds of nesting birds
I am officially calling it – spring migration is over. With migrating birds, as with people, there are always stragglers and wanderers who keep things interesting, but for all intents and purposes, it’s now simply breeding season.
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May 31, 2023
The connection between horseshoe crabs and red knots
This week on The Bird Report, the connection between horseshoe crabs and red knots.
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May 24, 2023
The many shades of the warblers of May
May is a month of intense and concentrated bird migration. Unlike fall, when legions of younger birds take their sweet time heading south over a period of several months, spring migration is short and serious – taking too long could mean you don’t get to breed this year.
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May 17, 2023
Bird-a-thon aftermath
As the dust settles on another Mass Audubon Bird-a-thon weekend, it’s time to catch up with all that went down.
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May 10, 2023
The Bird-a-thon
The last week or so has been an odd one in Cape Cod birding. While we were sitting and waiting on the songbird migration floodgates to open, pouring forth warblers, orioles, hummingbirds and such, the bird world came at us from a different direction.
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May 3, 2023
A massive and likely unprecedented ornithological event
Though, as usual, I didn’t have any actual birding plans, my weekend somehow ended up a triumphant birding success.
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