Photos of the Montauk Wheatear

In case anyone had not seen it (or did and wants a souvenir) here's the Northern Wheatear found by Karen and Barb Rubinstein at TRCP in Montauk a couple of weeks ago.

Judging from the size and rich rosy tones , this is almost certainly a 'Greenland' Northern Wheatear, which nests in southern Greenland and northeastern Canada. They migrate back to Europe in the fall (via Iceland) where they join up with other populations and travel south across the Sahara desert to winter in open grassland and rocky areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. So this is a bird that is very much out of place in Montauk.

Where is it now? Florida? The Caribbean? Will it successfully winter in the tropics somewhere and return north in the spring? All great questions that we do not have answers to yet. Perhaps one day we will be able to mark these birds and follow their movements better.

One thing rare birds teach us is that the world of nature is interconnected. Here's a bird that only a few weeks before was with musk ox and arctic foxes in the arctic tundra and it's parents at least may have known lions, gazelles and other animals of the savannah.