Birds are on the move. Some of our summer residents are headed south and birds from the north are passing through to their wintering ground.
To understand a little more about migration, Pam and I went down to Manomet Center for Conservation Services in Manomet, Mass.
For more than 40 years Manomet has maintained a consistent spring and fall migration banding program with seasonal staff, interns, and regular, experienced volunteers. The banding team operates 50 mist nets on the property surrounding the Manomet headquarters in southeastern Massachusetts. The nets are kept open for weekday daylight hours during the migration seasons. Banders walk the net routes at least once an hour, remove trapped birds and take them to the banding lab where their species, age, sex, weight, and fat content are measured and recorded.
Bird banding
Fellow Brit Trevor Lloyd-Evans, director of the Land Bird Banding Program, gave us an excellent presentation on their work and the migratory patterns of birds. He showed us several birds netted that morning and demonstrated the banding process, in which each bird is given a numbered band of the appropriate size and released. Among the birds we were able to see were a red-eyed vireo, catbird, tufted titmouse, and chickadee. When in hand, one can gently blow on a bird’s breast feathers and observe the yellow fat build-up that nurtures them on their long migration flights.
The data collected at Manomet and other research institutions shows a precipitous decline in the population of almost all songbirds. Climate change is affecting the timing of migration, and if birds get to their breeding grounds in the spring before their food sources are available, there are major die-offs.
Some birds, like cardinals, chickadees, and the American robin are short-distance migrants, maybe just going to Connecticut or North Carolina, while others such as the pectoral sandpiper breed in the Arctic and may migrate to the tip of South America. At a recent shore-bird workshop at the Mass Audubon Joppa Flats Education Center, we did indeed see some pectoral sandpipers that were on their way through.
Fall favorite: tree swallows
One of our favorite fall birds is the tree swallow. We see these massing at Parker River Wildlife Refuge in August and gorging on the bayberries there. They travel in compact clouds of thousands, whirling around and descending en mass to feed on the bayberries or down into the sea grasses where they roost at night.
Last year we saw this same phenomenon on Nantucket. This year on a recent visit we saw them only on one day, whereas last year we saw thousands of them each day for 10 days. Unfortunately, the winds this year were not from the northwest, which facilitates and directs their migration past Nantucket.
While on Nantucket we took advantage of a couple of birding walks led by local birders and managed to see a few migrants, including a lesser black-backed gull, which is a European species becoming more common this side of the pond. This was a first for us. In a farm field we saw a lark sparrow, which is rare in the Northeast and more common in the Southwest. Pine warblers in their various plumages were plentiful as they nest on the island.
This year on the farm we had quite a few nesting birds along with the Carolina wren I talked about previously. We had nesting barn swallows, a couple of pairs of bluebirds, tree swallows, cedar waxwings, common yellowthroats, red winged blackbirds, song sparrows, cardinals, great-crested flycatchers, chickadees, tufted titmice, English house sparrows, and others.
Jocelyn, my 8-year-old neighbor, who, along with her siblings, has a great interest in birds, saw a bald eagle fly over her house on East Bare Hill Road. I believe someone else reported seeing one in the vicinity, too. This is one bird I have never seen around the farm, but I am glad someone as young as Jocelyn noticed and was able to identify it.
Poisons: a threat to birds
I have been reading some of the threads on the Nextdoor Harvard website and have noticed that several contributors are having trouble with various animals with whom we share our environment. Mice, snakes, mosquitoes, raccoons, etc. all share our space and are vital to an active, healthy environment.
Calling an exterminator who most likely uses poisons is not, in my opinion, what should be done. A red-tailed hawk that had become a fixture on an office building at Fresh Pond in Cambridge was killed by eating mice contaminated with De-Con. This is not an isolated incident; there are many more such poisonings, not only of birds but also of household pets. Chemicals will ultimately find their way up the food chain, killing other animals needlessly. The same goes for insecticides and herbicides used on lawns and gardens. It seems that we have not learned our lesson from D.D.T. because we are still dumping chemicals into our environment.
David Durrant lives with his wife, Pamela, on East Bare Hill Road at Micheldever Farm, where they watch birds—their own peacocks, chickens, and visiting wild birds.
