I guess I will call him lonesome George for want of something better. Last year Gus Ben David got a call from someone at the Martha’s Vineyard Airport saying they had a weird partridge-like bird hanging around. Gus identified the bird as a chukar.

Chappaquiddick has a powerful and stunning visitor from the North. Olsen Houghton and Joel Graves were between the Cape Pogue Gut and Cape Pogue Lighthouse on Dec. 2 and spotted a snowy owl working over the dunes. They were able to videotape the bird and watch it for quite a while.

It is fun to catch up on what has been seen on Island while we were away. I think this is the first time in years a rare bird didn’t show up while we were away. Maybe the jinx is broken.

I woke up in that daze created by flying for 10 hours and waking up in an unfamiliar bed.

“Leaping lemurs — did you hear that, Flip?”

“Yes, if we weren’t in Madagascar I would swear it was a turkey,” he replied.

This week’s most exciting sightings are Sally Anderson’s reports of pine siskins on Nov. 4 and 8 and common redpolls observed in Aquinnah on Nov. 12. To have these northern finches around this early, and widespread across Massachusetts, means that they may be relatively common this winter. These finches only migrate this far south when food is scarce in their northern forest homelands. Last winter the seeds they eat were abundant, yet the birds were virtually absent in New England.

Regrettably, a very brief summary will suffice for birds brought here by ex-hurricane Noel, which massaged the Vineyard with 60 mile-per-hour gusts and about two inches of rain last Saturday. Local birders were hopeful: tropical systems moving north along the East Coast can produce spectacular birding, blowing in anything from offshore migrants like phalaropes, to southern seabirds like sooty terns, to songbirds like blue grosbeaks diverted from their usual migration routes.