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Franklin’s Gull

    RARA AVIS

    This Week’s Bird Sightings

    By

    Confirmed bird sightings on the Outer Cape in the week preceding the Independent’s deadline on Tuesday, June 10 included the following, based on a report prepared by Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary.

    Sightings at Race Point in Provincetown this week included a very rare Franklin’s Gull, a King Eider, 2 Common Murres, 2 Little Gulls, 17 Roseate Terns, a Sooty Shearwater, and 6 Manx Shearwaters. Also, 2 Northern Fulmars were seen from a whale watch boat over Stellwagen Bank.

    The Franklin’s Gull nests in freshwater prairie and open-country marshes and migrates mostly through the continent’s center, using agricultural fields, marshes, and reservoirs, and winters mostly along the Pacific coastline of Peru and Chile, according to the people at the Cornell Bird Lab. This is a bird whose population has declined over a long period — for reasons having to do with habitat loss and pollution — by almost 3 percent per year between 1968 and 2015, or 76 percent over that period, and in the U.S. by over 6 percent per year, or 95 percent, during the same period. (Photo by Barbara Wheeler/USFWS)

    There were 2 Common Nighthawks in Truro.

    That same Chuck-Will’s-Widow is still in Eastham.

    Not a peep from Wellfleet.

    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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