Spring birding in the Pioneer Valley is generally pretty special but 2025 seemed to be well above the norm as far as I could tell. I was leading a trip for Naturalist Journeys LLC in Belize in early March but as reports from home filtered through, it became pretty clear that exceptional numbers of geese and waterfowl were passing through the Pioneer Valley. Impressive reports from the Sunderland/Montague area involved up to 4-6000 Canada Geese feeding in the corn stubble fields close to the Connecticut River. Having literally just returned from travel and preferring to stay close to home, my first local field outing of the month found a Pink-footed Goose at Munn's Ferry Road in Gill on March 11th. It was a distinctive individual with notable amounts of white flecking around the base of the bill, worthy of mention simply because the next day Hector Galbraith found a different individual a couple of miles further upriver in the Northfield Meadows.
Impressive as these birds were, and the thousands of geese they were with, nothing prepared me for the events of the evening when a routine check of the gulls at Barton Cove revealed a Northern Lapwing! The poor bird looked distinctly out of place standing alone on the ice slightly adrift of the gulls. Every once in a while, a gull from the flock would chase it off but it always settled back down and remained into the evening long enough for a handful of local birding friends to see it. Alas, I couldn't be there the following morning but from what I understood, the ice flows at Barton Cove had changed completely overnight and neither the gulls or the lapwing were present. We learned a day or so later that a visiting birder had also photographed the lapwing around noon on the 12th opening up the intriguing possibility that the bird had spent the entire day at the cove without being noticed! As it happens, March was a pretty good month for seeing Northern Lapwings in the north-east US with well-watched individuals reported from Newburyport, MA, Long Island, NY and Jamestown, RI in the days before the Barton Cove sighting. But, at least according to ebird, the Barton Cove bird was the last Northern Lapwing to be seen anywhere in North America in the spring of 2025.
The impressive numbers of waterfowl passing along the Connecticut River Valley continued to feature throughout March with Snow and Cackling Geese turning up among the Canadas and an early Red-throated Loon at Barton Cove, but I was genuinely surprised on the 20th when a swan resting on an obscure marsh off the Mohawk Trail caught my attention while driving. Since I'd never seen a Mute Swan anywhere near that marsh I turned around for a closer look and was a bit disappointed to see the bird already in flight and getting ready to depart. Luckily for me, its departure plan included a nice, close fly-past along Rt 2 before it disappeared off to the West - a Trumpeter Swan! The following day a flock of 10 Sandhill Cranes passed over Northfield Meadows, the largest single gathering I've seen in the Pioneer Valley. Although well established as a low destiny breeding species in the western hill towns of Massachusetts, these birds were clearly migrants and ultimately continued heading north.
April opened with inclement weather on the 3rd inducing a huge waterbird fall-out at Barton Cove/Turner's Falls. Outstanding counts were recorded in several species including Bufflehead, Red-necked and Horned Grebes, and Long-tailed Duck but were neatly capped off by a female Tufted Duck found by Ted Gilliland. The latter was initially found at the Turner's Falls power canal with a few Buffleheads, Lesser Scaup and Ring-necked Ducks allowing for close study and ruling out the specter of an aythya hybrid. By the end of the day the Tufted Duck had moved over to Barton Cove, the whole event furnishing just the third record for the Pioneer Valley, the previous two also being found by Ted!
An early Great Egret (in full breeding plumage) turned up at the old Pilgrim Airfield in Whately on the 4th, about two weeks ahead of my previous earliest. As impressive as these April highlights were, the next bird completely caught me off-guard. While driving home from an evening bike ride on the 10th, I noticed a 'raptor' teed-up high in a roadside tree in Gill. It was along a stretch of Main Road that I'd driven a thousand times and an area which I knew to be frequented by a pair of Red-tails. I very nearly drove on but there was just something about this bird that made me turn around and take a second look, and I was so glad that I did....it was a Short-eared Owl! It's high perching posture had initially thrown me for a loop but it soon flew off with characteristic moth-like wing beats and began quartering over the field of rough pasture below. Then, in what seemed like a bizarre move, it flew across Main Road, over a new construction site and into the NMH Campus! It was clearly a migrant on the move and, not surprisingly, never seen again.
Another weather event on April 26th brought a full breeding plumage Laughing Gull to Barton Cove, found by Ted again, and only the third county record. At some point during the morning it was joined by a Caspian Tern, both species together and looking resplendent in full breeding plumage resting on an exposed sand bar. By 10am, the Laughing Gull had already departed but the Caspian Tern lingered for the whole day as they often do at Barton Cove.
May was good for Brants at Barton Cove with flocks of 14 on the 2nd, and 15 on the 9th when torrential rain grounded four Short-billed Dowitchers at the former Pilgrim Airfield in Whately providing a rare opportunity to photograph them. Historically, all of the local Short-billed Dowitchers I've noted have been flyovers. Impressive numbers of 'grounded' Common Loons spent some time resting at Barton Cove early in the month when I tallied 61 on the 5th, the largest gathering I've seen there. And, the last day of May brought a small arrival of shorebirds to the Caldwell Road fields in Northfield including a White-rumped Sandpiper along with several Semipalmated Sandpipers and Semipalmated Plovers.
As most local species settled down for the breeding season in June, I 'settled down' accordingly and did very little birding though the first few days of the month produced some late, roaming migrants with a singing Wilson's Warbler at Pauchaug Brook boat ramp in Northfield on the 3rd, and a singing Kentucky Warbler in Gill on the 5th. Though July would hardly qualify as a 'spring' month, over the years it's been a good time to look for Acadian Flycatchers in the hemlock woods of northern Franklin County and this year came up trumps when Daniel Shustack found a singing bird at Mohawk Trail State Forest on the 10th. Trips to the tropics prepared me well for the hike involved as it was incredibly warm and humid on both the dates I visited, but I did meet with success on the 15th and the 21st. The bird was typically aloof and difficult to locate in the sub-canopy but the patch of forest it chose was beautiful and was absolutely no hardship to be there. I got the impression the flycatcher was an unattached male searching for a niche.
Finally, as a postscript of sorts and scrolling back to the winter. I was out of the country tour leading in Trinidad when I learned from a friend of a Harris's Sparrow visiting private land in Deerfield during the harshest days of a severe cold snap in late January. Unfortunately, this bird had chosen a feeding spot that couldn't accommodate birding visitors. It was accompanied by a tiny handful of juncos, cardinals and White-throated Sparrows and could really have turned up with any feeding flock just about anywhere in Franklin County, so why that spot?! Ironically, according to ebird, the only other acceptable Franklin County record also comes from Deerfield, found by the legendary Harvey Allen way back in Jan/Feb 1999.
