State wildlife officials and the Mass Audubon bird conservation group are advising residents to bring in their bird feeders and birdbaths until more is known about a mysterious avian ailment.
At 6:45 a.m. on a Saturday
morning near the Poucha Pond salt marsh at Chappaquiddick, a few fishermen lined the shores and a handful of binocular-bearing biologists and birders walked through the dunes. Otherwise, the land was bare of human activity.
But in the sky a bird with deep black and bright white striped wings swooped nearby. The binoculars went up.
“That’s a willet,” said Luanne Johnson, director of the nonprofit BiodiversityWorks dedicated to wildlife research, monitoring and mentoring.
I broke two Cardinal rules of birding and blew it for my two birding companions, Lanny McDowell and Warren Woessner. We were birding around Crackatuxet Cove by the old Pearl Factory where we understood that there was a willow flycatcher nesting. Willow flycatchers are not a common nesting species on the Vineyard, so we wanted to see it. We were in the car driving out slowly toward the Katama Airport when all three of us spotted the flycatcher at the same time. Warren stopped and without thinking I quickly jumped out of the car.
Luanne Johnson and crew from Biodiversity Works recently had an opportunity to help capture willets and fit them with geolocation data loggers, which are also known as bird loggers, geologgers, geolocators or GLS. Joe Smith, a research ornithologist from New Jersey and a pioneer in geolocator tagging, came at the request of Biodiversity Works. The crew went to three locations: Little Beach in Edgartown, the Narrows and the beach next to Poucha Pond on Chappaquiddick.
While winter storms have threatened some waterfront homes, they’ve been a boon to nesting piping plovers, who prefer the scoured beaches left by storms and hurricanes. But this year’s population of the tiny migratory shorebird still face challenges from predators.
The nesting season for the birds of Martha’s Vineyard is upon us. Last week’s discovery of the brown creepers’ nest nudged other birders to sharing their bird nesting stories. And I started thinking about all the different nests I have seen on the Island. The variety is amazing and the different architecture and material choices is immense. The range in size and shape is incredible, from the tiny one inch across and one inch deep cup of lichens and moss woven together by our ruby-throated hummingbird to our fish hawk’s massive old nests.
The monitoring of Vineyard fish hawks, or ospreys, is an ongoing project. Although osprey comings and goings have been recorded since 1913 on-Island, the study of the osprey population did not start until the 1970s by Gus Ben David. Osprey nests had been documented in Lambert’s Cove, Chappaquiddick and on the Takemmy Trail (the road between West Tisbury and Edgartown) in the 1950s. Then came the 1960s and the uncontrolled use of the pesticide DDT. The Vineyard’s osprey population dropped to two or three pair.
