On the Wing

If given the opportunity, a turkey vulture would eat you, your kids, and your little dog, too. Other bird species may be struggling, but the turkey vulture is doing just fine eating dead things. Yes, with increasing signs that the end is nigh, the turkey vulture is a strong candidate for Bird of 2024.

Odds are, you’re not going to see an American bittern, despite its large size. Frankly, the American bittern doesn’t want to be seen; it chose invisibility as its superpower. Still, this is the best time of year to try; make the experience at least as much about the journey as the destination.

When the ball drops marking the beginning of the new year, for some, a silent gun goes off and an invisible race begins. They’re the bird listers, and their goal is to find as many different species of birds as they can over the next year.

When darkness closed out the Audubon Montauk Christmas Bird Count and the species were tallied, participants agreed that the good weather might have played a role in the total: 134 were found, the highest in a decade.

There is something creepy about cormorants. From most distances, they look black, with long thick necks, tails, and wings. In flight, they appear like black crosses. Against a cormorant, fish have no hope; the tip of their orange bill is hook-shaped, a perfect tool to capture over 250 species of fish. Soon those single black crosses will join to form sky-wide, shape-shifting patterns as they migrate away.

Just over the lip of the dune bordering the lot at Scott Cameron Beach is one of the most important habitat areas for shorebirds on the entire East End: Mecox Inlet.

East Hampton is downright lucky to have a population of saltmarsh sparrows, birds that are vulnerable because of their dependence on a habitat that shrinks with every centimeter in sea level rise: the salt marsh. The sparrows themselves are not so lucky: they've lost 75 percent of their population since 1990. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is assessing whether the bird should be listed under the Endangered Species Act.

This is the best time of year to observe chimney swifts locally as they burst through the skies over our villages. You’ll never see a chimney swift land, or even come close to street level. In their daily circuits, they can fly 500 miles a day in pursuit of something like 12,000 flying insects.

It’s hard to mistake the great egret: lengthy yellow bill, long black legs, large white body in between. They have sinewy necks, sometimes stretched straight, other times tucked into a squat S, as when they’re flying.

Cardinals, among our earliest singer each spring, are so familiar you might forget to appreciate them, but a century ago they were rare in New York.

Red-breasted mergansers rely on the open waters of our winter bays and harbors from November until April. They’ll be there if you walk anywhere along the bay side of the South Fork, between Southampton and Montauk. While they prefer salt water, they also frequent Hook Pond, Sagaponack Pond, and Georgica Pond.

You don’t need to go deep into the woods to find a red-bellied woodpecker, but if you're looking for a distinctive red belly, you won't find it. Instead, its head is red, which explains why people often misidentify it as the red-headed woodpecker, which hardly shows up on Long Island.