Island birders got together Sunday evening to review their tallies of Vineyard species for the 60th annual Christmas Bird Count.
The information from the count will be included in the multinational citizen science bird census for 2020, which is organized by the National Audubon Society. For decades, serious birders on-Island have woken up at the crack of dawn after the holidays to catalogue flocks of green-winged teal swimming along the shoreline, or catch a rare glimpse of a black-and-white warbler resting in a thicket.
The bird count is coordinated by BiodiversityWorks, a wildlife monitoring and research group, with 13 territories split up into teams, and a captain heading each team of birders. There are more than 100 species of birds on Martha’s Vineyard, and the citizen science initiative seeks to document (and hopefully photograph) those that are commonly seen, and some that are less so.
And birders were happy to report high numbers of some species this year, such as a large group of green-winged teal at the Captain Flanders Inn property, and a good showing of ring-necked ducks feeding in Edgartown Great Pond.
Pete Gilmore found the lone redhead duck in Edgartown, and both the Aquinnah and Squibnocket teams counted 16 harlequin ducks.
Luanne Johnson, director of BiodiversityWorks, asked whether it’s possible both teams counted the same ducks. “I don’t think so, because they were really scattered all over the coast, and we had to spend a lot of time going around looking for them,” said birder Brad Winn.
Much to Robert Culbert’s excitement, he spotted the only ring-necked pheasant of the count as he and his team were driving to a birding spot: “That was the first bird we saw. We drove into Sepiessa, and it crossed the road right in front of me. I was the lead car, and no one else saw it, but a male pheasant is kind of unmistakable,” Culbert said.
According to Culbert, the number of wild turkeys found on-Island during the count period was above average. Around 223 were spotted this year, with 21 being the all-time low, and 139 being the average.
While loon numbers were high across the board this year, especially up-Island, fewer great cormorants were spotted (although the number of double-crested cormorants has been increasing, according to Culbert).
While great cormorants are often found off Squibnocket Beach on the large boulder, the rock was bare this year.
Culbert was able to identify the only bald eagle of the count at Tisbury Great Pond — a juvenile that he believed may have been circling a deer carcass near Mal Jones’ property.
While discussing the unprecedented number of dovekies (41) that Brad Winn found off Pilot’s Cove, Johnson remarked on the number of people she saw out on the beach while she was birding.
“There were a lot of people out on the beaches, when normally it is just us on Christmas count day. Just wow, I had never seen it like that before now,” Johnson said.
While some birds weren’t recorded during the count period, a number of species were seen just days before.
There were no woodcock recorded in the tally, but Tara Whiting-Wells said she had a fun experience when she was taking her springer spaniel out for an evening walk, and the dog flushed a couple out from the scrub.
Matt Pelikan, who writes the “Wild Side” column for The Times, said he wasn’t able to find the flock of rock pigeons that normally hang out by the Steamship Authority Terminal in Vineyard Haven. “We do have a lot of Cooper’s hawks around, so maybe that’s why,” he suggested.
Tony Lima performed a magic trick by finding the only merlin of the count, which he spotted sitting on the Wasque osprey pole as he was wrapping up his day of birding.
And for the first time since the 1990s, a black-and-white warbler was spotted at Herring Creek. “That is only the third black-and-white warbler since 1960, so that is really cool,” Culbert said.
Possibly the most enigmatic experience of this year’s Christmas count was Olsen Houghton’s reported sighting of a large flock of rare vesper sparrows at the entrance to Seven Gates.
As Houghton’s group was trying to flush out meadowlarks, a flock of 25 birds landed in the field directly adjacent to them.
“The most distinctive characteristic of this flock was the white stripes on the side of the tails,” Houghton said. “I wouldn’t bet my entire life on the call of a vesper sparrow, but we did come to a group consensus.”
Lanny McDowell suggested the possibility that the birds could have been longspurs, as they tend to flock more like buntings.
Houghton said he would fill out a rare bird report and include as much detail as possible about the distinguishing features of what he saw.
