Late fall is an efficient time to seek out rarities on Cape Cod. Just a few far-flung birds might be counted on to reach from the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, and the southwestern United States right now of 12 months, and birders will congregate to see them.
One of the largest birding locations on the Outer Cape this fall has been Old North Cemetery subsequent to Route 6 in Truro. Old North hasn’t been a very well-liked birding spot right here — till now.
Birder Phil Brown was driving down Route 6 on Oct. 28, and as he handed the cemetery, he noticed a flock of starlings and brown-headed cowbirds sitting on the wires. But amongst these black and brown birds he seen one fowl that regarded totally different. He shortly pulled over to get a better take a look at what turned out to be a yellow-headed blackbird.
Yellow-headed blackbirds usually dwell within the American West and are uncommon guests to the Outer Cape. This species is sighted lower than as soon as every year right here, and most of the time it’s seen solely as soon as earlier than vanishing. This specific fowl, although, was no one-day surprise: The subsequent morning it was again on the wires, and birders began displaying as much as see it.
One of them was Peter Grose. While ready for the blackbird to point out up shortly after dawn, he noticed a wierd sparrow associating with a small flock of chipping sparrows within the cemetery and shortly realized this fowl was a lark sparrow — a big sparrow with an exquisite facial sample that can be a uncommon customer from western North America. Only one or two of those are seen every year on the Outer Cape. This fowl, too, drew a small crowd of birders over the course of its keep in Truro.
Why would two uncommon Western birds be discovered on this one patch of land inside 24 hours of one another? It’s pure to assume there have to be one thing particular in regards to the cemetery that birders have been blind to, one thing solely sparrows and blackbirds can see.
More seemingly, although, what occurred right here was an instance of what bird-watchers name the Patagonia Picnic Table Effect.
The phenomenon takes its title from what occurred at a relaxation cease alongside Arizona State Route 82 close to the city of Patagonia. In the late Sixties and early Nineteen Seventies, a sequence of uncommon birds have been discovered there. As creator Kenn Kaufmann writes in his e book The Kingbird Highway, an area birder found that this unassuming relaxation cease was a dependable spot for uncommon Mexican species like rose-collared becard and thick-billed kingbirds. His observations naturally drew extra birders to the positioning.
Once birders have been on the scene recurrently, they noticed extra rarities. Some of those, like a yellow grosbeak and a flock of black-capped gnatcatchers, have been so uncommon that that they had by no means been seen within the U.S. earlier than in any respect. Thus, the Patagonia Picnic Table Effect: uncommon birds appeal to birders, who, just by being there, flip up extra uncommon birds.
Old North Cemetery will not be the one place this has occurred on the Cape. When Massachusetts’s first Siberian sand-plover was present in Mashpee this previous summer time, birders who went to search for it discovered a uncommon Baird’s sandpiper. In Bourne, in January 2021, birders on the lookout for a black-headed gull (a vagrant from Europe) discovered an ash-throated flycatcher (a vagrant from the Southwest), then birders on the lookout for that fowl discovered a Townsend’s warbler (a vagrant from the Pacific West).
Seeing quite a lot of uncommon birds on the identical day is pleasant. And every time it occurs, there’s a form of unstated query: had the preliminary fowl not proven up, would the next rarities have ever been discovered?
We’ll by no means know, after all, whether or not the lark sparrow at Old North Cemetery would have been discovered had Phil Brown not noticed the yellow-headed blackbird first, however it’s straightforward to think about it wouldn’t have been. Before Brown posted about his sighting, folks have been birding the cemetery about as soon as a month at greatest, in response to information from the web site eBird. That leaves loads of time for a uncommon sparrow to go unnoticed.
If the Patagonia Picnic Table Effect tells us something, it’s that there are a number of uncommon birds which can be missed until birders have a motive to come upon them. I’m wondering if this fall’s sightings will deliver extra bird-watchers to Old North Cemetery for years to come back. After all, the subsequent uncommon fowl may very well be there proper now.
