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.
Birds
2007
September 20, 2007
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.
May 10, 2007
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
July 22, 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
May 22, 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.
2001
January 4, 2001
Purple Gallinule Lands on Island From the South
By E. Vernon Laux
At noon on New Year's Day, Stephen Carlson of Oak Bluffs made
a remarkable discovery.
Mr. Carlson had just left his home on a dirt road when, upon
reaching the pavement, he noticed an object in the road. Dazed and
confused, walking and standing in the middle of the road, was a very odd
bird. As if recovering from a celebratory New Year's Eve, this
bird was bobbing and weaving.
1986
March 14, 1986
Is it too early to be thinking about the breeding season? Yes, in general, but no for the piping plover, a species that usually returns to Martha’s Vineyard in late March and begins nesting by mid-April. For this year, on Jan. 10, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service added this species to its list of endangered and threatened wildlife.
