COVER STORY
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WORCESTERMAGAZINE.COM
J A N U A RY 7 - 13, 2021
The early (winter) birder gets the bird: Winter bird watching in Worcester VEER MUDAMBI
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very year, Martha Gach would find the winter berries in her yard thoroughly picked over. “For years, I always wondered what happened,” she said, as she never managed to catch the culprit. However, as the pandemic forced more people to work from home this year, she was finally able to solve the mystery when she witnessed a flock of robins decimate her berries. Throughout the summer they hunt the lawn for worms but in the winter, as Gach observed, they enthusiastically switch to fruit. While the common understanding is that birds fly south to avoid the cold weather, migration
is more about food availability than temperature. In the spring and summer, most birds are eating bugs, which become harder to find in winter. “All our warblers, for example, have hightailed it down to Central America and the Caribbean because there are bugs there year-round,” said Gach, conservation coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Broad Meadow Brook Wildlife Sanctuary. The species that can find other food sources — namely seeds and berries — are the ones that stay through the winter months, such as chicadees, blue jays, gold finches, and, of course, robins. Not only do a variety of species stay year-round, New England is actually a winter destination for birds from Canada or even
A rare hybrid of a red-shouldered and red-tailed hawk, two species who prefer to stay local during the winter. This bird was photographed by Worcester County resident Cynthia Rand in West Boylston. the Arctic. “It’s like Florida to them,” said Gach. These part-time residents start arriving around November, including multiple sparrow species but also raptors such as hawks and even snowy owls. Migrations, especially long distance ones, are fraught with danger and take an enormous
amount of energy. “It’s an incredible journey that birds will undertake, if they have to,” Gach pointed out. “It will blow your mind what these little, tiny creatures are capable of facing — hummingbirds, for instance, can cross the Gulf of Mexico.” But the birds who stay on are probably wondering why migrate when
you can make it through the winter with a change of diet? Raptors, while they don’t change what they eat, will also try to stay through the winter until the depth of snow cover prevents them from hunting. Their behavior has more to do with how much snow covers the ground C O N T I N U E D O N PA G E 10
