Louisa Hufstader
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.
Bird news
Birds
Mass Audubon

2008

I may have to change the name of this column to the raptor report. Great excitement on Chappaquiddick, first the Fowle family observed four merlins on August 14. Two were immature merlins. How did they know they were immature? One merlin was being fed by the adult female and the other was begging food and fluttering its wings. So the Chappaquiddick merlins fledged at least two birds!

2007

osprey

Raptor. The name carries a lot of weight. So much velocity and ferocity are associated with it. In the bird world, the title refers to owls, hawks and eagles, vultures and the osprey.

The Vineyard has three owl species in summer and three or four more in winter. Three hawk species can survive here year-round. Almost any hawk species found in eastern North America might find its way here.

Tisbury Great Pond looked like a Japanese painting, flat calm with a fine mist hanging just over the surface. It was so quiet it was eerie. The silence was broken by the honking of a flock of Canada Geese. The birds rose up in a V-formation through the fog and headed directly towards my kitchen window, creating quite a din for such an early hour. At what seemed the last second, the flock sailed over the roof and headed towards Black Point Pond.

The forces which punched a hole in Norton Point and opened Edgartown
harbor to the Atlantic Ocean might present a headache for town
officials, but from an ecological viewpoint, they have all the benefits
of a big natural spring cleaning.

2004

Now a genetic study of the skins of scores of heath hens, all of them from the Vineyard, shows that the Island bird, although it looked and behaved much like its supposed parent species in the Midwest, was a wholly distinctive creature. Genetically it was more different from the greater western prairie chicken - that supposed parent species - than the Midwestern bird is from any other family member in its genus, which includes the lesser prairie chicken, the endangered Attwater's prairie chicken of eastern Texas, and even the sharp-tailed grouse. It is possible that instead of being a subspecies of the prairie chicken - which scientists have considered it to be since it was first typed in the last years of the nineteenth century - the heath hen might have been a species unto itself.

2003

A flap has arisen in Aquinnah over the illegal shooting of a large
number of cormorants earlier this month on tribal land. The killings
took place near the historic herring run, the oldest operating herring
run on the Island. The incident raised questions about how laws are
enforced by the tribe.

Pages