Banding Station Offers Rare Views of Birds

  Wellfleet Bay returned to its roots this past month with the re-introduction of bird banding, something that was done very actively here by the Austin family from the 1920’s through much of the 1950’s before the property was acquired by Mass Audubon. The banding is being conducted by licensed master bander and wildlife biologist James Junda and […]

Spring Features Newsworthy Bird Activity at Wellfleet Bay

Spring is always exciting as colorful and charismatic birds move north for a new breeding season. But April 2022 has been especially birdy at the sanctuary, including visits by a couple of  unexpected species. Birds Making News First, a lovely male Indigo Bunting sporting his eye-popping blue breeding plumage was spotted for several days, somewhat […]

Fall Migration Brings the Usual and Not-so-Usual Birds

The days are growing shorter and cooler as we approach the holiday season.  Along with these changes, another season – the fall migration of birds in North America– is drawing to a close.  As migration concludes, the bird banders at Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary have wrapped up their work for the year.  I have volunteered […]

That Eureka Moment! Spadefoot Toad Breeding at Ashumet Holly Wildlife Sanctuary

After ten long years of dedicated conservation effort by Mass Audubon staff, volunteers, and citizen scientists, the population of eastern spadefoot toads (Scaphiopus holbrookii) translocated to Ashumet Holly Wildlife Sanctuary has finally reproduced! A pilot project started by Long Pasture Sanctuary director Ian Ives and Bryan Windmiller of Zoo New England was initiated in 2011 […]

Sanctuaries’ Purple Martin Colonies Becoming Hot Real Estate

For Cape Cod bird lovers, there are many rites of spring; hearing the first buzzy call of a phoebe or witnessing a returning Osprey or Piping Plover. People prepare their hummingbird feeders and clean out nest boxes in the hope they’ll eventually be filled with baby birds. At Wellfleet Bay, we recently spotted our first […]

Piping Plovers and People: It’s Complicated

In June coastal waterbird volunteer Jeannette Bragger and fellow-volunteer Nancy Braun began monitoring a Piping Plover nest on a very challenging North Truro beach. In this post, Jeannette details how the season went—for them and the birds. Life is tough for Piping Plovers on the Outer Cape. Not only do they often have to contend […]

The Challenges of Terrapin Field Research: A (Pillow) Case Study

The following post was contributed by UMass researcher Patty Levasseur. For many years, Wellfleet Bay has worked tirelessly protecting diamondback terrapin nests and releasing hatchlings to help this threatened species. Even so, the health and size of the terrapin population in Wellfleet Bay remains mostly unknown. To answer some of these questions, we began a […]

Why Watch Pine Warblers?

When he’s not doing bird research at Wellfleet Bay’s bird banding station, what biologist James Junda really likes to do is—more research! For the past year, James has had his eye on Pine Warblers. It’s a species that hasn’t been studied very much and the sanctuary offers a special opportunity to do so. “They’re very […]

Connecting the Dots … and Reducing Stress for Sanctuary’s Box Turtles

This post was contributed by volunteer Tim O’Brien who’s currently doing a study of eastern box turtles and works to conserve other threatened and endangered turtles. In 2018 we instituted a non-permanent paint dot marking system for the sanctuary’s eastern box turtles. Here’s why. There’s anecdotal evidence suggesting that repeated handling of box turtles over […]