Today is Groundhog Day, the midway point between the onset of winter and the spring equinox. Spring, on the calendar, astronomically and for birds and other wildlife, is a scant six weeks away. It is also the only day of the year that is named for a mammal other than humans (which of course are not as cute as groundhogs).
While having little to do with birds, any odd celebration midwinter appeals to the likes of this writer. Bird sightings have hardly been overwhelming, and it seems like a good idea to augment these with a little talk of groundhogs, which are nothing like a hog. While birds are my favorites, talking about groundhogs for a short while today just make sense.
Groundhogs are a large, burrow-dwelling rodent. Groundhogs are also known as woodchucks and Eastern marmots. Groundhogs are one of the few animals that really hibernate. Hibernation is not just a deep sleep. It is actually a deep coma, where the body temperature drops to a few degrees above freezing, the heart scarcely beats, the blood flow slows to almost nil, and breathing nearly stops. This saves tremendous amounts of energy, enabling them to make it through the winter. The groundhog as weather predictor is an old wive's tale. Flipping a coin would be more accurate!
In bird news, the two northern lapwings — large Eurasian plovers, rarely encountered in North America, which first appeared on Nantucket on the heels of Super Storm Sandy on Oct. 30 — continue to be spotted as of Jan. 31. They have made it through the coldest weather on the Cape and Islands in several years.
All are hoping they make it through the winter to see what happens in the spring.
Having two northern lapwings overwinter is wholly without precedent in our region. These birds break and set a new record every day that they're here. If that were not enough, they are spectacularly colorful, tremendous to watch in flight and make some very nice call notes.
It has been a treat to have seen these birds nearly every day for the past three months. I hope they continue to delight birders from around the country. Currently these two — and a group of three in central New Jersey — are the only known northern lapwings on this continent.
Lastly, I got a call from a gentleman named Kevin Wiggin of Nantucket who was working at a house near the water at Tom Nevers on Nantucket on Nov. 20, when he happened upon a dead hawk. He told me it had a band on its leg, and that it was from Denmark. My pulse accelerated as visions of Eurasian raptors such as hobbies and red-footed falcons filled my head.
He brought the bird to me at the Linda Loring Nature Foundation on Nantucket; I confirmed the identity as an immature peregrine falcon, much to my chagrin for forgetting about Greenland and its peregrines. I reported the band to the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen, which is the clearinghouse and record keeper for all banding done in Denmark.
I just got an email from the museum, replying to information I sent in a couple of months ago. The young peregrine falcon found on Nantucket was banded as a nestling on Aug. 1 about half way up the west coast of Greenland, a territory of Denmark.
The bird's sternum was sticking up like a knife — the bird clearly had died from starvation. It was otherwise uninjured. The bird is now in the permanent bird collection at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University in Cambridge.
The peregrines that breed in western Greenland are the most migratory race of these falcons in the world. Transmitters that can be read by satellites show that peregrines that breed on the west coast of Greenland mostly migrate to the southern reaches of South America, making at least a couple of long distance flights over open water.
The dead peregrine was still in the nest Aug. 1 and found 3˝ months later on the southeast corner of Nantucket. Typically, young peregrines in Greenland fledge much earlier, and they are able to hone their hunting and flying skills that they need to travel more than 10,000 miles south to Patagonia.
This young bird fledged too late to learn how to survive.
Until next week — keep your eyes to the sky!
E. Vernon Laux's birding column appears every Saturday in the Cape Cod Times. Laux is the resident naturalist for the Linda Loring Nature Foundation on Nantucket. You can hear him on "Bird News" with Mindy Todd at 11 a.m. the first Saturday of the month on the Cape's NPR station, WCAI, 90.1, 91.1 and 94.3. You can also listen to his "Bird News Commentaries" on Wednesdays at 8:35 a.m. and 5:45 p.m. He can be reached at email@example.com.