Last year was an amazing year for birders on the South Shore. Mass Audubon's Friday Morning Birders saw 220 species of birds over the course of 50 weeks. 220 species! That's a lot of gulls, a lot of warblers, a lot of hawks, a lot of ducks. And that included one bird species - hoary redpoll - which we had never seen before on the Friday morning series, in 21 years.
Consider this: in 2009, just four weeks of it, we've already seen five birds that we did not see in all of 2008, one of which we have never seen before, in now 22 years of the weekly program. If I say it, will I jinx it? Looks like it could be a special year.
I saw the ivory gull, above, on Wednesday morning. We had just finished cleaning out the tree swallow boxes on North Hill Marsh in Duxbury and decided to take a ride down to Plymouth Harbor. That did not mean that the bird would still be there when we got there on Friday; for that, we kept our fingers crossed.
Friday arrived, and we set out. We swung through Jenney Pond to find the resident lesser black-backed gull, and then turned toward Plymouth Harbor. First, we found the birders, then we found the bird. The last ivory gull seen in Massachusetts was on Plum Island on February 2 and 3, 1985, meaning that no matter what, this was a first time species for our list. Birders from as far away as Pennsylvania were there. One guy had driven from the Keystone State to Gloucester, slept in his car and missed the ivory gull up there, turned around and went home, heard about the Plymouth gull and drove back up again. And there he was, staring it in the face. He said it was the best bird he had ever seen.
We notched the bird and moved on to Duxbury Beach. The world there was more tundra-like than I had ever seen, snow and ice everywhere. And the birds there fit the landscape, snow buntings, a snowy owl, and plenty of gulls. On two occasions a short-eared owl surprised us. Or, should I say, me, as strangely each time it passed, I was the one to spot it. Sometimes, that's how it goes. I caught the image above just as it flew away for the last time.
Off the end of the Gurnet, way out on the sea, beyond the harbor seals and amongst the long-tailed ducks, David Ludlow pulled out another life bird for me, my third this month without leaving Plymouth (the southern end of Duxbury Beach is in Plymouth), a king eider.
Last week I pondered where we would go from there. This week, we found a place to go, thanks to the arrival of our extralimital friend from the Artic Circle. So I repeat, after this amazing week of wildlife watching on the South Shore, what the heck do we do next?
