Cape Cod Bird Club Holds February Meeting on Monday

BREWSTER – The February meeting of the Cape Cod Bird Club will be held on Monday at 7 p.m. at the Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster.

This month’s speaker is Mark Faherty, who will speak on Birding Panama.

Though smaller than many U.S. states, Panama offers some of the best birding in Central America.

Lying at the break point between North and South America, it shares many species with Costa Rica and Columbia, and also hosts many of our wintering Neotropical migrants much of the year.

In this talk, Faherty will focus on two recent Mass Audubon trips to the lowland rainforests of the canal zone and foothills and cloud forest.

These trips were mostly based at the famous Canopy Tower, where owls, puffbirds, multiple species of sloths and monkeys and many other birds could be seen at point-blank range, from the dining area or the roof deck.

Day trips to the species rich lowland rainforest of Pipeline Road produced birds like the Chestnut-backed Antbird and the Slaty-backed Forest Falcon among many others.

Faherty has been the Science Coordinator at Mass Audubon’s Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary since August 2007 and has led birding trips for Mass Audubon since 2002.

While his current projects involve everything from oysters and horseshoe crabs to bats and butterflies, he has studied primarily bird ecology for the last 20 years, working on research projects in Kenya, Florida, Mexico and the Pacific Northwest.

Faherty is also the past president of the Cape Cod Bird Club and is a current member of the Massachusetts Avian Records Committee.