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Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Fork-tailed Flycatcher Alert

A Fork-tailed Flycatcher has shown up in Massachusetts yesterday at the Massachusetts Audubon Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary in South Wellfleet, Cape Cod, Massachusetts. This is a tropical species , well off it's migration route. It has shown before, quite rarely, in a number of locations in the U.S. and southern Canada. Most records are from the East Coast in fall.
I took the above photo of one that showed up in November 2006 on the coast of NH, much to the delight of many New England birders, including us. That tail is just amazing.

Being a flycatcher, it mostly sat around on perches then sailed out to grab insects in the air. But the NH bird also ate berries. Here's a photo of it plucking off a bittersweet fruit.
If you want to see the Massachusetts bird, hurry on down. It was still being seen this afternoon. You can see photos of it here.

2 comments:

Tootie said...

Your bird photos are absolutely beautiful. I especially enjoyed the older photos of Sanibel birds.

Prairie Walker said...

Northeast Kansas birders were hoping one sighted across the river in Missouri this year would make its way across the border and thus be added to the Kansas list. But, alas, the bird stayed in Missouri.