From the Portsmouth Herald:
Tropical bird makes way to RyeArctic Ross’ gull in California: here.By Beth LaMontagne
blamontagne@seacoastonline.comRYE — Bird enthusiasts across the Seacoast have been flocking to Odiorne Point to catch a rare glimpse of the recently spotted fork-tailed flycatcher.
Native to South and Central America, the flycatcher doesn’t usually appear as far north as New England.
The last time a fork-tailed flycatcher was seen in the area was around 10 years ago at Fort Foster in Kittery, Maine, said Becky Suomala of the New Hampshire Audubon Society.
The recent sighting is particularly exciting, she said, because it is the first documented record of the bird in New Hampshire.
The fork-tailed flycatcher is pale gray with a black head and a white belly.
It is distinguished by its wide wingspan and long, deeply forked tail.
Birders first saw the flycatcher on Saturday, and its arrival was immediately announced on the online state bird watching list serve NH.birds.
The flycatcher has been spotted perched in shrubs and feeding on bittersweet and glossy buckthorn berries.
Birders also have reported observing the bird’s dramatic flight pattern of swooping turns.
Although the fork-tailed flycatcher rarely comes this far north, it occasionally makes appearances in other areas along the Eastern Seaboard.
This bird likely came to New England by way of a recent storm track that ran up the East Coast from the South, said Suomala.
The flycatcher was likely flying its migratory path and was “blown off course,” she said.
Scientists attribute most rare bird sightings to the birds getting lost on the migratory path, including the west reef heron that was seen in New Castle and Kittery this August.
That long-legged water bird is indigenous to Africa, but bird experts guess it, too, was caught in a storm and carried — either by its own flight or on a ship — to the north Atlantic.
Many of your thoughts here have no basis in reality, just typical hate banter.
Comment by Mike — November 6, 2007 @ 5:13 am
Hi Mike, what do you mean? Do you mean that the spotted fork-tailed flycatcher does not exist? Or that it did not come to New Hampshire? Or that the Portsmouth Herald did not report on it?
Or do you mean, like in this quotation in an October 17, 2004, New York Times Magazine article by Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush:
The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality�judiciously, as you will�we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors�and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
However, I am far being from such a Bushist neo-conservative (everyone can see how the Bushists'’own reality’ in Iraq has made over a million dead and counting).
And if your cryptic comment related to that, why post it as a comment to a post about a spotted fork-tailed flycatcher?
Comment by Administrator — November 6, 2007 @ 10:16 am