Embedded Files
Northern Wheatear
(formerly Greenland Wheatear, Wheatear)Oenanthe oenantheNorthern Wheatear
Howard Miller was walking along the Sodus Bay Street Car Line in the Garson Avenue neighborhood when he saw a bird flying back and forth from the tracks to a nearby fence. The fence ran alongside two vacant lots that had been converted into a neighborhood sandlot. Miller made sure of the bird’s identity, then went a quarter of a mile to nearby Cedarwood Terrace to alert a relative newcomer he had taken under his wings. “It was a nondescript kind of bird,” Clarence Barg told this author 72 years later. “Basically brown and white, not a bird that you would remember like, say, your first cardinal. It wasn’t even as colorful as a meadowlark would be. It looked like some of the thrushes.” But it wasn’t. It was Rochester’s first and only sighting of a Northern Wheatear -- “the most interesting bird to appear here in many years,” Edson noted in his next Weekly Bird Report. The date was either 1 October 1934, according to the Monroe County annotated list, or 2 October 1934, according to Edson, and the official location was Alvord Road, which dead ended at the tracks in what was still only a half-developed residential area, Barg explained. (WBR, 8 October 1934)
Background
“This may be the only regularly breeding passerine bird of North America that migrates to wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, crossing either the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Eurasia,” notes the profile of this species in The Birds of North America series. North American populations of this Eurasian bird breed in northeastern Canada and Alaska, generally in open, rocky places with limited vegetation. So remote are its breeding grounds that it has apparently been little disturbed by humans, and in fact has been expanding its range along the west coast of Hudson Bay and in northeast Labrador. As of 1996, vagrants had been reported from at least 33 provinces and states, with the vast majority occurring in eastern Canada and northeastern U.S. “Small numbers of vagrants now recorded annually in s. Canada. Most vagrant records are from the fall.” (BNA 316: 1-3)
Status
The Monroe County annotated list (1985) described this as a casual, very rare visitant.
Occurrence
Miller’s bird is the only record here. This species’ Arctic breeding range extends into northeastern Canada and Greenland, resulting in rare but increasing sightings in the eastern U.S. during migration. But in 1934, it wasn’t shown in any of the dimestore field guides that Barg had access to. “I would never have known what the bird was.” But it doesn’t surprise him in the least that Miller nailed the identification. “I don’t think there was a bird observer in this whole area who could match him.“Howard was always on the lookout for birds.”
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse