Birders flock to Great Barrington airport to see a whimbrel — a rare bird blown off course due to the storm

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A recent storm blew whimbrels off course and grounded them at the Walter J. Koladza Airport, which drew the attention of local birders.

Doug Lister, left and Lisa Lister, of Cheshire, peer at the whimbrel spotted Monday at the Great Barrington airport.

Editor's Note: This article was updated July 17 to correct Lisa Lister's position at Fairview Hospital.

GREAT BARRINGTON — When birders heard that the storm had likely blown a whimbrel off course and grounded it at the airport, they dropped whatever they were doing and grabbed their spotting scopes.

“It’s hard to know why exactly they end up where they do,” said Gael Hurley, peering through binoculars after high-tailing it to the Walter J. Koladza Airport from her home in Dalton. “But storms push them.”

In this case the Arctic-born shorebird missed its typical flight path by more than 200 miles. It may be the first sighting at the airport, but not in Berkshire County. Someone recorded seeing one in October of 2015 at Pontoosuc Lake, according to eBird, a bird-sighting website.

The lone whimbrel spotted Monday at Walter J. Koladza Airport by birder Greg Ward drew birders from across the Berkshires.

Monday’s sighting, first reported by Greg Ward on an app for a rare bird spotting group at 12:39 p.m., pushed Hurley out the door just as she was about to unload groceries on her day off work.

It pushed Lisa Lister out of the lab at Fairview Hospital where she is the supervisor.

“I skipped out of work,” Lister said after taking a long look through her binoculars, still in scrubs. Her husband, Doug Lister, joined her from Cheshire, a spotting scope slung over his shoulder.

Whimbrels breed in the arctic tundra of Alaska and Canada then make long trips on their way to South America.

Birders came and went from Walter J. Koladza Airport in Great Barrington Monday after Greg Ward reported the sighting of a whimbrel.

Over the course of the year, these shorebirds take uninterrupted flights with stopovers in the salt marshes of New England, like those in Wellfleet, Cape Cod, said Alan Kneidel, a conservation biologist who specializes in whimbrels and shorebird conservation in general, as well as the Atlantic flyway.

They’ll spend two to four weeks there fattening up on fiddler crabs, said Kneidel, who works for Plymouth-based Manomet, a bird migration conservation group.

Kneidel and other Manomet scientists are tracking a number of whimbrels on which they attached satellite transmitters, and that data can be viewed online. Whimbrels and shorebirds in general are in decline, Kneidel said, due to a likely combination of factors including disruption in stops on the migration path and possibly rising sea levels. Whimbrels also are hunted for food in the Lesser Antilles and the coast of northern South America where they winter — something conservationists want governments to crack down on.

“We’re working hard to figure it out,” he said of the declines.

Birder Ruth Green, of Monterey, at the airport Monday to see the whimbrel.

The lone airport whimbrel will likely join its brethren on the coast at some point, Kneidel said, adding that this sort of peeling off from a flock isn’t unusual.

“Sometimes they can think that they’re having a nice happy tailwind,” Kneidel added, “and come upon unexpected bad weather. This can prompt them to ground themselves and stop flight.”

It was a landing that thrilled birders like Ruth Green, of Monterey, who wore a shirt that said “Birders Against Borders.”

Chuck Johnson was about to pick up a mystery for a “reading break” when the whimbrel report sent him heading south from his home in Williamstown.

They are all members of the Hoffman Bird Club, which hosts birding trips, talks and engenders the camaraderie seen at the airport Monday.

Birder Greg Ward scans the Stockbridge Bowl in November. Ward was the first to spot the whimbrel Monday at the airport.

Greg Ward, the club’s president who first sighted the whimbrel, said in a phone interview that the airport can be a treasure trove for bird watching, since the short mown grass, especially when wet, attracts them. Ward likes to check it out after a storm, and says that, yes, birding is now such a habit that “you just get to a place where it really gets to be a focus.”

On Monday at around noon, he heard a bird call distinctly different than the killdeer, another shorebird that convenes around the airport, and there it was, Ward said of the whimbrel, “flying low just like one of those airplanes on the tarmac.”

Heather Bellow can be reached at [email protected] or 413-329-6871.

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