OCTOBER (9/28/01)

September has seen many small birds, especially the insect eaters, heading south. They stoked up in all our woods and along our shores before starting their long flights. October is the month of late fall migrants. Geese, ducks, sparrows, and hawks are heading south in numbers. Some are leaving our area, and others are just arriving.

Our first white-throated sparrow arrived earlier than usual on September 13, but we know that many more of them, along with other sparrows and juncos will show up in October and even November. Although many folks dread October’s nor’easters, birders recognize them as opportunities for observing pelagic birds, those birds that live at sea. Sandy Neck, Barnstable, and First Encounter Beach, Eastham, are Cape places to observe shearwaters, jaegers, phalaropes, ducks, gannets and for a few lucky sentinels, an occasional northern fulmar.

This is also the season for hunting many game birds. I can't help but laugh when I read the Fish and Wildlife Service's frameworks for the hunting of certain migratory birds. I laugh, not at the Fish and Wildlife Service but at myself, because the birds whose limits are set are the very birds I can never be sure I will see from one year to the next.

Then, when I finally realize there are actually those who not only find these birds but who are also cool and competent enough to be able to take aim and fire at them, I really feel as though I'm in on a big joke. Obviously, I am not tittering about birds as widespread and docile as mourning doves.

No, I'm bent over double thinking what my bag limit on woodcock, snipe, rails and other game birds would be. These are all tough birds to find, never mind see. Woodcock and snipe depend on their protective coloration to render them invisible and seem to know their leaf-patterned backs will not give them away. They wait until they are nearly stepped on before they explode off the forest floor. While I am still adjusting my binoculars and trying to quiet my hammering heart, they are safely away. How, then, could I expect to shoot one?

Rails are especially secretive by nature. They slip silently through the cattails and either freeze motionless when disturbed or fly weakly from one spot to another. Once they drop back down, they remain out of sight. In the spring when they are courting and breeding (and cannot be hunted), some will respond to a taped recording of their call by striding briskly through the reeds to drive away the supposed intruder from their territory. Thus, they can be lured into the open where they can be studied and admired. Once their nesting is over, this ruse will not work, so one intent on rousing a rail in the fall must either wade or pole a boat through a marsh.

Unfortunately, I shouldn't laugh at all at the absurdity of my being able to bag a dozen of any of these birds in a season. I should cry, for in past centuries these same birds were astonishingly abundant, and even I might have had a chance to enjoy my limit. According to Edward Howe Forbush in his 1912 volume, Game Birds, Wild-fowl and Shorebirds, "In the 19th Century, the discharge of a musket near a marshy pool would seem to cause the whole marsh to rise in a mass that blotted out the sky. For days the sky was never clear of birds, and sometimes was entirely obscured for hours." Isn't that one of the most remarkable statements you have ever read?

Forbush documented incredible shoots of grouse, turkeys, ducks and geese and sounded much like today's Audubon societies and environmental groups in his pleas for a sane approach to saving America's wildlife. He recognized that although the cutting down of forests drove out many birds and mammals, and many were killed by fires in the woods, these were not nearly so destructive as the traps, nets and snares devised to capture birds. Great guns were usually mounted upon a swivel in the bow of a boat, like a small cannon.

So, what was fair game to our forefathers is now a regulated true sport today.

GRAPHIC: Common Snipe depend on their protective coloration to render them invisible and seem to know their leaf-patterned backs will not give them away. Photo copyright by Smithsonian Institute