Come for the cranberries, stay for the purple gallinule
It’s a juvenile Purple Gallinule with ginormous feet, an appetite for spiders and no fear of people, and it’s the rarest thing in a Cape Cod...
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Science & Medicine
Weekly Bird Report on WCAI
The Weekly Bird Report with Mark Faherty can be heard every Wednesday on WCAI, the local NPR station for Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, Nantucket, and the South Coast. Mark has been the Scienc...
Episodes
20 of 43 episodesCrested Caracara saga continues
A Crested Caracara spent a month at Wellfleet’s Duck Harbor, drawing birders from all over, then vanished. Then one flapped across the winds...
A logjam of birds
When the nor'easter finally let up, a backed-up wave of fall migrants arrived on the Cape, from Black-throated Blue Warblers to a Bell's Vir...
I guess they call them storm petrels for a reason
Leach's Storm-Petrels, Long-tailed Jaegers, Northern Fulmars, a South Polar Skua and two Sabine's Gulls all rode in on a stubborn nor'easter...
A whale of a birding trip
A whale watch out of Barnstable Harbor turns into an unforgettable show of humpbacks, dolphins, and pelagic birds feeding together off Stell...
Migration stories
Fall migration turns the yard into a crossroads, from a pale young Blackburnian Warbler foraging on the ground to a bedraggled Broad-winged...
Shorebird homework
The Crested Caracara pulled its usual disappearing act in Wellfleet, and a Swallow tailed Kite in Mashpee just set a state record for the la...
Return of the caracara
A Crested Caracara turns up at Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary, marking the second Cape sighting of this warm-climate raptor this summer. T...
Kite excitement
After literally years of trolling us, the weirdest presumed breeding bird on Cape Cod has finally given up the goods. The huge, unmistakable...
Migration at the cliffs
That famous Bridled Tern is back in the news again, this time at Seagull Beach in Yarmouth. But there's bigger birding happening on the Vine...
thrifty birds
Late-summer Cape Cod brings rare Swallow-tailed Kites and spectacular waves of migrating shorebirds. Find out where to see both before the s...
A tern of the head
Shorebird migration is picking up, but the world's friendliest rare bird stole the show. This week, the famous bridled tern toured Cape Cod...
A tern of the head
A rare tropical seabird has spent weeks charming its way around Scituate Harbor, perching on cars, deck railings, and even the heads of beac...
It’s not a falcon
A Crested Caracara, a tropical bird of prey rarely seen north of Florida and Texas, turned up at Race Point in Provincetown this week, one o...
Bath time
It's all about water. One refilled bird bath brought a flood of orioles, a Wellfleet Bay stream draws in warblers and bluebirds, and a volun...
Cousin Chuck isn’t leaving
As Whip-poor-wills grow scarce in the region's pine woods, a larger and considerably ruder cousin has taken up residence: the Chuck-will's-w...
(More than) one good tern and other June surprises
Despite its reputation as a quiet month for birding, June delivers a string of surprises on the Cape and Islands this week, led by multiple...
Putting the nature in nature playground
A short stop at a Mass Audubon nature playground becomes an insect safari full of parasites, predators, mimics, and a tiny fly with a very b...
May’s last hurrah
A spring storm delivers rare seabirds, massive flocks of songbirds, and the Cape’s first confirmed Prothonotary Warbler nest.
The hawk and the hummingbirds
Wildlife photographer Diane Palomba noticed something strange at Long Pasture: hummingbirds nesting suspiciously close to a Cooper's Hawk. T...