Since Wellfleet Bay began retrieving cold-stunned sea turtles on beaches this month, it’s become clear that this regular fall phenomenon is as much about people as it is the animals we work to protect.

The desire to help an endangered and threatened species always draws dozens of new volunteers to our doors, whether to walk beaches or drive turtles to the New England Aquarium for medical care and rehabilitation. We now have 200 people who have undergone the required training and devoted themselves to this effort.

Some of our veteran turtle folks clearly have spent some time thinking about better ways to get cold-stunned turtles off the beach. Bruce Beane, who walks three-mile-long Great Island, often at night (!), has put a lot of thought into turtle portage:

 

The sea turtle season also inspires young people. One of them is 12 year old Charlie Marcus, who has been donating his own money to turtle conservation since he was eight! He and his dad Peter traveled from their Los Angeles home to walk considerable distances on the Outer Cape to find cold-stunned turtles.

 

Our friends from King Philip High School in Wrentham, Abby Melanson and Alex Welch, paid a visit along with about 8 of their friends to our Sea Turtle Open House and to do what they love best—patrol beaches for turtles.  Abby and Alex managed to raise $1500 dollars this year to benefit Wellfleet Bay’s sea turtle program by selling turtle necklaces as part of an international career development competition (read more in Young Sea Turtle Enthusiasts Walk the Walk).

 

And we can’t neglect to mention all the great folks we don’t always get to meet—the daily beach walkers who find turtles and read our posted beach signs about what to do. At Sea Street Beach in Dennis, we encountered a Kemp’s ridley moved to the upper beach, in a perfectly executed bed of wrack where we found the turtle safely waiting for our arrival.

 

In the spirit of the holidays, we are grateful to all of our volunteers, neighbors, and turtle lovers from over the bridges who help us in one way or another in what has become a Cape Cod wildlife conservation tradition.

 

Every banding season seems to have its memorable moments.  This year’s fall migration was marked by a tropical storm called Jose.

Jose’s winds did a lot of crazy things with birds. Perhaps most significant was the extremely rare Masked Booby that was blown in to LeCount Hollow Beach in Wellfleet.

Late summer and fall featured a lot of tropical storm activity in the Atlantic Ocean, with the month of October being 40 % more active than usual, according to the National Weather Service.

This probably helps explain the young Orange-crowned Warbler banded here on October 13th. The bird, of course, was heading south. But six days later, we got word it had been recaptured by banders in the opposite direction—Nova Scotia!

It’s an example of what’s known as reverse migration,  a sort of boomerang effect which can be caused by storms and weather fronts churning the atmosphere, confusing migrants, and tossing them back from whence they came.

Each fall gives brings some news on who appears to have had a good breeding year. This not only included all the young Orange-crowned Warblers and Palm Warblers, but also the first ever Cape May Warblers  banded at our Wellfleet station. The spike in Cape Mays may have been due to a big outbreak of spruce budworm in the boreal forest. Lots of food can mean good chick survival and higher fledging rates– possibly the only positive result of this destructive insect.

Each season seems to turn up something odd. Such as these chickadees, two of which had some extra white feathers.

Sometimes white plumage is the result of a genetic mutation. These birds had their normal gray juvenile feathers (we know because the birds didn’t replace them). So, it suggests some sort of fungal or stress condition. If they survive until next fall (and having extra white feathers could make it harder), these chickadees should molt back into normal gray, black and white feathers.

Toward the end of the banding season, we were lucky to catch several of these great birds:

Catching more than one of these vireos is unusual for us and to have three could be another instance of that boomerang effect. Massachusetts is the northern edge of their breeding range. Because they migrate later in the fall, these birds very well could have been pushed back north by the steady southerly winds that occurred as late as the first week of November, when the bird pictured above was banded.

These migratory detours no doubt are perplexing and even dangerous for traveling songbirds who do enough flying as it is. Still, it’s a treat to see such relatively unusual and beautiful birds and it’s one of the many benefits of doing bird research on the Outer Cape.