We are now past the halfway point of June, and knocking on summer’s door. This means that your standard, work-a-day bird migration is over for the time being. Everyone that’s coming back is back, and those passing through are through. Even the late-comers are nesting now, like the Eastern Wood-Pewees that don’t arrive until early June. But that doesn’t mean that the bird finding fun is over, because the wandering weirdo birds are out in full force.

For a couple of years, my wife, Emily, has been asking for a piece about a favorite bird of hers, one that we enjoy watching in our yard each summer, the high-spirited Great Crested Flycatcher. As week after week went by without a flycatcher piece, it became sort of a running joke. “What should I write about this week?”, I would say. “You know”, she’d reply. Well, at long last, the time has come. This week’s subject is, the Acadian Flycatcher. Oops – sorry Emily. Wrong flycatcher.

After years of teases, of leads that didn’t pan out, failed attempts and clues gone cold, the news I’ve been waiting for has finally broken. At last, we have “smoking gun” evidence of a legitimate Bald Eagle nest here on Cape Cod, one with a real live baby eagle in it. The eagle has indeed landed. And if you want to know where the nest is, listen all the way to the end for the big reveal.

On the night of May 15 th , several of the state’s elite birders could hardly sleep. The forecast looked too good to be true – southwest winds over a broad area to our south, then rainstorms out of the west continuing into the predawn hours. This could be it, the big one. The fallout.

This past weekend, the fickle gods of bird migration finally smiled on the Cape. To our south, favorable tail winds got migrant songbirds up and flying our way on Friday night, while a front coming from the west brought rain and unfavorable winds. These forces conspired to guide, then ground those migrants along our coast.

Every morning from April to August, Mary Keleher puts her hair up in a ponytail and heads out to a Mashpee golf course, where she uses a rope-and-pulley system to lower white plastic gourds from trees. Inside each gourd is a nesting pair of birds.

Weather-wise, this has been a pretty good month, if that month were February. But hopefully, now that it’s mid-May, most of the snow and multi-day wind storms are behind us, so we can focus on what’s important right now. And what’s important right now is warblers.

If you’re like me, you had a lot of neighbors return over the weekend, and they don’t appear to be self-quarantining. Weirdly upbeat in these difficult times, these newly arrived locals can be heard whistling cheerful tunes as they settle back in to their routines in yards and gardens. Many are even visiting crowded food establishments and communal baths of suspect sanitary status. Obviously I am talking about your local orioles, catbirds, and hummingbirds, and they got here not a minute too

With the welcome arrival of May and a little warm weather, bird migration should finally be kicking into high gear. And with that comes a change in our local soundscapes as locally nesting songbirds arrive and the males immediately get down to defending their territories.

So many things happened in the local bird world this week, a head-spinning assortment of headline material, that I’m having a hard time zeroing in on a topic. A Yellow-billed Loon, only the second state record, was found at Race Point in Provincetown.