In case you haven’t heard, the Globetrotters are in town. Not the basketball ones, in case you thought of them first for some reason - I’m talking about the actual globe trotters, the Arctic-nesting shorebirds.

Let’s face it, insects suffer from a likeability deficit akin to that of most politicians, what with the biting and the disease transmission and the landing on your food right when you’re about to eat it and all. But I think we can all get behind butterflies, those harmless, even beneficial, and undeniably beautiful ambassadors for the insect world.

About 20 years ago I was doing bird surveys for my graduate research all through the Cape Cod National Seashore – I had over 300 survey points from Fort Hill in Eastham to Wood End in Provincetown, and I knew the park, including deep, off-trail areas, as well as anyone.

On Monday, though it’s full-on tourist season and many of my local friends had been putting out “shelter in place” warnings on social media, I bravely ventured from the Lower Cape to deep in the heart of the Upper Cape.

Recently, Mass Audubon has turned its conservational gaze upon an inconspicuous and imperiled coastal resident. This saltmarsh sprite lives life on the edge, only nesting in the daily-flooded coastal marshes from southern Maine to Chesapeake Bay, where they struggle to complete their nesting cycle between the monthly high tides.

While kite-o-rama continues on the Cape, with both kite species still turning up from Mashpee to Harwich, the Vineyard scored this week with an even less likely bird with a long, bifurcated tail.

Mid-June is kind of like the slack tide in the Cape ornithological calendar. Songbird and shorebird migration are over, with most birds now busy breeding across the Northern Hemisphere.

We have a backlog of old business to attend to here at Bird Report central, namely, what’s going on with breeding birds right now? The answer is, they are battling for their lives and the lives of their children in this war zone we call the suburbs.

What’s lanky and lost and pink all over? It’s the American Flamingo that spent Sunday afternoon at Chapin Beach in Dennis. Only a lucky few got to see it, but this real, actual flamingo was indeed there. But how did it get there, and where did it come from?