Susan B. Whiting
It is not proper for birders, naturalists or any type of scientist to anthropomorphize: a 50-cent word that means giving a human personality to something that is not human. It’s often hard to avoid this, but the most difficult test for me is the Carolina wren.
Gay Head or Aquinnah has the Vineyard birders enraptured watching the movement of large numbers of raptors in the last two weeks. To steal the words of Pete Dunne, David Sibley and Clay Sutton from their book Hawks in Flight, bird watchers in Gay Head observed a collection of wind masters (buteos), artful dodgers (accipters), fish hawks (osprey), great foolers (northern harriers), falcons, and big black birds (eagles and vultures) passing over the Vineyard on their way to points south.
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.
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.