Over the course of the next two weeks you will see a surge of late-season birders charging around like pool balls after a particularly good break.
Then they’ll coalesce.
Some odd birder bonding ritual?
Somebody find some body?
No. It’s Wild Card Week in Cape May. The week the mega-rarities turn up.
What is a mega-rarity? It is a bird so rare that birders will twitch with excitement at the mere thought or mention of its occurrence in Cape May.
A new county record. Maybe a state record. Maybe even (dare I even suggest it?) a first record for North America.
It is the avian equivalent of opening a box of Cracker Jacks and finding the Hope diamond. It’s like going into your recently deceased great aunt’s attic and finding a mint condition Colt Paterson revolver in the original packaging.
Well, maybe it’s not quite as good as that but pretty darn close.
The first couple of weeks of November is rarities prime time. Anything, I repeat, anything is possible.
Why?
It’s like this. Birds have established ranges and they have established patterns of behavior. Some birds have restricted ranges or their “normal ranges” are far, far from here. We don’t see them because they aren’t here.
Duh.
Precisely.
As for patterns of behavior, many (but certainly not all) birds migrate. Some have migration routes that pass right over Cape May. Some have patterns of migration that come nowhere near Cape May. An example is Bar-tailed Godwit. It jumps off western Alaska and flies nonstop to the South Pacific. Never gets within 5 time zones of Cape May.
But Bar-tailed Godwit has turned up here. In every generation of birds, a certain, small percentage don’t do what everyone else is doing. They are directed by some little mental quirk to take the path less followed.
They go the “wrong” way.
When they do, they turn up hundreds, even thousands, of miles away from where they are supposed to be. Sometimes the birds taking the path less followed find a new and better place to be. This is the foundation of evolution. Most aren’t this lucky. They find someplace like West Swains, New Hampshire or Cape Sable, Nova Scotia.
If every other member of your species headed to Belize because it was nice and warm and you ended up in West Swanzey, New Hampshire by the first week in November the folly of your venture would be manifest.
So come November, winter closes its fist over the north and puts the squeeze on living things. Those that don’t belong have got to leave or freeze or die of starvation.
A few of these winter-driven waifs find their way to Cape May which, because of the ameliorating warmth of the surrounding water, stays warm, later than other more inland locations.
The birds stay. And in Cape May, it doesn’t take long before some skilled birder stumbles upon them.
Thirty minutes later, there’s a crowd.
In recent years, there have been Calliope Hummingbirds and MacGillivray’s Warbler (both Rocky Mountain species). There have been Cave Swallows (from Texas) and Violet-green Swallows from...well, from any place west of the Great Plains and north to Alaska.
There was, once, even a Brown-chested Martin. Second North American record. The birds are more commonly found in South America.
Do all rare birds turn up in November? No. Anything can happen anytime in Cape May. You get used to it after a while.
A recent addition to the Cape May bird list was a Brown-headed Nuthatch. It was found in Cape May Point. It constituted a new state record.
Where do Brown-headed Nuthatches live?
The closest colony occurs just across the bay in Lewes, Delaware. You can almost see the
Loblolly Pines they sit in. You...
Sorry. Phone just rang. Guy just claimed he saw and then convincingly described a White-tailed Kite.
Gotta go.