5 records
MARC number | Decision | Species | # | Location | County | Arrival | Departure | Observers | Report |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
1966-002A | NA | Western Wood-Pewee | 1 | Monomoy | Barnstable | 8/29/1966 | 8/29/1966 | J. Baird | 12 |
1966-002B | NA | Western Wood-Pewee | 1 | Monomoy | Barnstable | 9/11/1966 | 9/11/1966 | J. Baird | 12 |
2009-049 | NA | Western Wood-Pewee | 1 | Manomet, Inc., Manomet | Plymouth | 9/25/2009 | 9/25/2009 | Ian Davies* (ph), v.o. | 15 |
2023-028 | R - recirculate | Western Wood-Pewee | 1 | South Monomoy | Barnstable | 8/22/2023 | 8/22/2023 | James Junda* (ph) | |
2024-007 | A | Western Wood-Pewee | 1 | Tuckernuck Island | Nantucket | 6/9/2024 | 6/9/2024 | Richard Veit* (ph, au), Joe Clark*, Tom Brown*, Lucinda Zawadzki* | 27 |
The Tuckernuck bird was singing and audio recorded, finally providing a conclusively documented record to support an occurrence in Massachusetts. The species surely has occurred before: Veit and Petersen (1993) listed four records including singles “mist-netted and collected at Monomoy 29 August and 11 September 1966 (Baird)” and sight records of birds heard singing at Monomoy May 28, 1976 (Goodrich, Bailey), and Morris Island, Chatham, May 23, 1980 (Bailey). No documentation of any of these is known; although the specimens were examined and confirmed by flycatcher expert W. Lanyon, they were destroyed by beetles (too bad the remnants were not preserved, since DNA perhaps could have been extracted!). The MARC voted 7–2 in 2008 (Rines 2008) to remove the species from the state list given the difficult identification involved and the lack of extant documentation. The coincidence in date and location between the Tuckernuck bird and the two other sightings of singing birds is notable!