Swallow-tailed kites are getting comfortable on Cape Cod

More than 300 species of birds have been recorded from Race Point, the second-highest list of anywhere on the Cape and Islands.

It’s not just back to school time for kids, all those billions of young birds that hatched over the spring and summer need to learn how to be birds, and it’s a real school of hard knocks.

In all my years of camping and doing field work around the US I never knew that flying squirrels could be camp scavengers.

The birds, being well-versed in Shakespeare, know that all the world’s a stage. Maybe not, but what they do know is that some of the world’s a staging area, and one of the most important staging areas is right here on the Cape and Islands.

In case you haven’t heard, the Globetrotters are in town. Not the basketball ones, in case you thought of them first for some reason - I’m talking about the actual globe trotters, the Arctic-nesting shorebirds.

Let’s face it, insects suffer from a likeability deficit akin to that of most politicians, what with the biting and the disease transmission and the landing on your food right when you’re about to eat it and all. But I think we can all get behind butterflies, those harmless, even beneficial, and undeniably beautiful ambassadors for the insect world.

About 20 years ago I was doing bird surveys for my graduate research all through the Cape Cod National Seashore – I had over 300 survey points from Fort Hill in Eastham to Wood End in Provincetown, and I knew the park, including deep, off-trail areas, as well as anyone.

On Monday, though it’s full-on tourist season and many of my local friends had been putting out “shelter in place” warnings on social media, I bravely ventured from the Lower Cape to deep in the heart of the Upper Cape.

Recently, Mass Audubon has turned its conservational gaze upon an inconspicuous and imperiled coastal resident. This saltmarsh sprite lives life on the edge, only nesting in the daily-flooded coastal marshes from southern Maine to Chesapeake Bay, where they struggle to complete their nesting cycle between the monthly high tides.