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When a nor’easter blew through Newton, Massachusetts, on December 16, 2007, it brought with it an unusual but unmistakable visitor to Anne Simunovic’s backyard. A Dovekie, displaced from its home in the North Atlantic, showed up at Anne’s feeders about ten miles west of Boston Harbor—the first Dovekie ever reported to Project FeederWatch.
The bird arrived on gusty winds that reached 25 miles per hour in the midst of a storm that produced eight inches of snow, sleet, and rain (on top of eight inches of snow already on the ground from a previous storm). Anne and her husband happened to be looking out the kitchen window when the storm-driven seabird did a belly-landing on the snow in their backyard. She wrote, “It was fascinating to observe this little storm vagrant: like a mini-penguin when upright but mostly hunkered down exactly like the illustration in The Sibley Guide to Birds.”
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Resembling penguins with their distinctive black and white colors, webbed feet, and upright stance, Dovekies are the smallest member of the Puffin family. Anne described her visitor as “a small, elongated rugby ball” with wings “clearly designed for swimming.” |
| Dovekie in breeding plumage by Tim Gallagher |
In the summer, it would not be unusual to stumble across a Dovekie in northwestern Greenland, where an estimated 30 million of the “Little Auks” reside during the breeding season. Although they breed along high arctic coasts, they typically spend their winters over the open Atlantic Ocean in search of food between Newfoundland and the Gulf of Maine.
On rare occasions, Dovekies show up along the east coast of North America, usually due to strong easterly winds that push them inland. One of the largest recorded inland movements occurred during the winter of 1932–1933 when large numbers of Dovekies washed up along the entire eastern seaboard and rained down on the streets of New York City.
Anne suspected the Dovekie in her backyard was rare for her inland Massachusetts town and a captive of the nor’easter. Despite several attempts, the bird was unable to take flight. Instead, it spent its time preening, hunkering under the shelter of a neighbor’s garage, and wandering around the icy puddles in Anne’s yard and driveway.
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“At one point I went out to check on where I had last seen it, but it wasn’t there. When I turned around to return to the house, I nearly stepped on it, so still and well camouflaged against the black driveway with its patches of snow and ice,” she said.
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| Dovekie found dead the morning after it appeared in Anne Simunovic's Newton, Massachusetts yard. |
Anne consulted with experts and searched field guides in an effort to care for the bird, but unfortunately, the exhausted Dovekie did not survive beyond its second day in Newton. Sadly, most pelagic species blown inland never make it back to sea. They require a large body of water in order to take flight, and consequently they need to be rescued by wildlife rehabilitators who are trained to safely capture and return them to open water. Anne donated the Dovekie to the ornithology curator at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Learn more about Dovekies on the Lab's All About Birds web site.
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