Susan B. Whiting
The breeding season makes birds do things they wouldn’t normally do.
The birding community welcomes home bird photographer Lanny McDowell! And speaking of the birding community, it is always fun to put 25 birders in one house and listen to the conversations. What follows is a sampler:
• “You heard a whippoorwill. I am envious, I haven’t heard one in years. Remember when you used to bump them off the dirt roads when you drove them at night? The darned feral cats, skunks and raccoons eat their eggs — easy prey as their nests are on the ground.”
We broke the record! The final total for the Felix Neck Birdathon was 132 species, and what a couple of beautiful days we had. The official start was 6 p.m. Friday and the end was 6 p.m. on Saturday. Friday early evening was clear, so owling was possible. A brief shower in the early morning hours of Saturday gave us what is known in the birding world as a fallout. Sunny, bright and warm with a bit of wind was the weather that greeted the birders on Saturday morning. Whit Manter hit the jackpot at Squibnocket as a mixed flock of warblers and vireos plus a couple of other song birds were in the willows to greet him.
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Lanny McDowell, famed artist and photographer, whose photographs of birds have graced the pages of the Vineyard Gazette, and in particular the Bird News, is in the hospital in Tucson, Ariz. Lan suffered an abdominal aneurism, from which few survive, while birding in the mountains of Arizona with birding friend Porter Turnbull. Lanny is a survivor. His experience is similar to that of the Vineyard’s ospreys. Close to extinction, the ospreys rebounded thanks to the efforts of a team of Vineyarders who erected osprey poles and scientists who helped ban the use of DDT.
The last field trip of the season for Martin County Audubon, how could we miss it? It would be kind of tough when they asked us to present a program introducing it. So I put together a presentation of Warblers on the Move for the Audubon Society of Stuart, Fla. I never could have done it without the use of Lanny McDowell’s fabulous photographs! I added a few of my own and a few of Nancy Price’s — a Stuart naturalist.