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RARA AVIS

This Week’s Bird Sightings

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Confirmed bird sightings on the Outer Cape in the week preceding the Independent’s deadline on Tuesday, Jan. 21 included the following, based on a report prepared by Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

The Spotted Towhee continued at the Provincetown Airport this week, and there was a Thick-Billed Murre in Provincetown Harbor. A Pacific Loon was at Race Point, along with a Harlequin Duck, a Dovekie, a Black Guillemot, 92 Razorbills, 14 Common Murres, a Glaucous Gull, 40 Iceland Gulls, 60 Snow Buntings, and 2 Lapland Longspurs.

Things are not going well for the Rusty Blackbird, which is amid “one of the sharpest and most mystifying recent declines of any North American songbird,” according to the people at the Cornell Bird Lab. The North American Breeding Bird Survey put its decline at nearly 3 percent per year, for a cumulative decline of approximately 75 percent between 1966 and 2019. Maybe the people in Wellfleet who’ve seen so many this week should get in touch with the scientists who have formed the Rusty Blackbird Working Group to try to make sense of the bird’s decline. Loss of wet woodland habitat is surely a culprit in the southeastern U.S., while here in the Northeast, Rusty Blackbirds have been recorded with unusually high mercury contamination — that’s a component of air pollution from coal-burning power plants that lands in our ponds, according to the Association to Preserve Cape Cod. (Photo by Dave Menke/USFWS)

There were 10 Rusty Blackbirds in Wellfleet this week.

The Canvasback is still around in Eastham.

If you have questions about these sightings or want to report a sighting, call the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary at 508-349-2615 or send an email to [email protected].

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