It is a challenge to type when you are offshore on a bouncy vessel in a series of line squalls! However, when weather breaks we find we are in good company. Wilson’s storm petrels and an occasional common loon are the most common birds we spot. Pods of dolphins, probably bottle-nosed, play in our bow wake for a while and then veer off to feed or find a new toy. Closer to shore we are joined by laughing, herring and black-backed gulls and common and least terns. A more familiar group of feathered friends are our companions as we near home.

June can be a slow time for bird watchers, but a great time to do some behavioral observations. Our local migratory bird species are back on Island. These birds, large and small, have found a mate, designed their nests, and settled in to raise their families. If conditions are ideal, they may raise more than one brood a summer.

Ellen, aka Lefty, Leverenz e-mailed me and attached two photos of downy woodpeckers that she had seen at her Chilmark feeders. She did so because the bellies of the birds visiting her feeders were not that lovely stark white we normally expect on these little woodpeckers. Instead the bellies of these birds were a dirty tannish color. Several days later I visited Larry Hepler and Alice Early at their Quansoo home and they mentioned that they had some dirty-bellied birds as well. I was able to see an Early-Hepler woodpecker and it had the usual black and white back but a decidedly tan belly.

Bird watching or birding, you may call it what you wish, is great hobby, occupation, form of relaxation, and more than anything else is an ongoing education. The learning experience involved in birding is one that has kept me hooked on watching, reading about, talking to others about, and surfing the net for information about birds for lo these many years.

Late spring can be an interesting time for Vineyard birders. Although the migration of dicky-birds as well as shore birds, waterfowl and hawks has finished for the season, there are always surprises. The sandhill crane that appeared last week isn’t a bird one would expect to see during a normal Vineyard spring migration. The return of the nesting pair of merlins on Chappaquiddick, which were reported by Rob Bierregaard and Dick Jennings on May 14, is an ornithological dividend. Lanny McDowell, Allan Keith, Pete Gilmore and I saw one of the merlins on May 23 and located the nest following Rob and Dick’s directions. The merlins are quite defensive and are probably already on eggs. These will take around a month to hatch and then the young merlins will need a month to mature enough to take wing. It is interesting that these merlins returned to the same area where Mary Adelstein and Margaret Fowle first saw them in early June 2008. We are still the only location for nesting merlins in Massachusetts! We hope our merlins will be as successful as last year.