Bird News
It was 5:30 a.m. and still barely light over Tisbury Great Pond. I noted motion over the pond and saw two birds chasing one another. Then I heard a distinctive rattle and realized that the silhouettes I was watching were two belted kingfishers. I put the kettle on and settled in to sip my tea and watch the sun come up. As dawn broke the two kingfishers raced by low to the pond, then they banked and rose up over the embankment and flashed a single broad breast band: two male kingfishers.
Whoa, where do I start? This long weekend brought several goodies for the Vineyard birders. It all started on Thursday, August 30, when Dick Jennings, who runs the Cape Pogue trips for The Trustees of Reservations, called in the morning to say he had spotted a marbled godwit at Cape Pogue the day before and was able to get a photo of the bird the next day. Great excitement resulted.
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.
Gus Ben David, director of Massachusetts Audubon's Felix Neck Wildlife Sanctuary in Edgartown, takes a four-wheel-drive vehicle out into the field