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In the twilight of a late March day in The Hawk, a tiny fishing community of 170 on the southernmost tip of Nova Scotia, birders gather on the bluff for what they hope will be a grand finale to a good birding day. They watch the shoreline below where huge numbers of Atlantic brant —around 9,000 by the third week of March—gather for their evening flight to roost in nearby Barrington Bay. Like vain performers the birds seem to enjoy building the suspense. Finally, as dark approaches, they lift en masse, an enormous avian cloud filling the evening sky. In the morning, they return in numbers to the rugged shore between Clyde River and Cape Sable Island. Cape Sable Island is an Important Bird Area because of four globally significant species: Atlantic brant, semipalmated sandpiper, semipalmated plover, and short-billed dowitcher. The endangered piping plover also arrives in nationally significant numbers, accounting for about 20 per cent of Nova Scotia’s nesting pairs. In late summer and early fall tens of thousands of sanderlings, dunlins, red knots, white-rumped sandpipers, and ruddy turnstones feed amongst the piles of thick, rubbery kelp on the beaches at South Side, The Hawk, and Daniel’s Head. The flat headlands and grassy dunes leading to the beaches become adorned with fat, orange rose hips and dangling Indian pears in the fall—a haven for many species of sparrows. The Cape Sable
area has abundant intertidal sand and mud flats, sand dunes, and
coastal woodland required for the large numbers and various species of
shorebirds. These include up to 10,000 semipalmated plovers and
semipalmated sandpipers, and 9,000 short-billed dowitchers. The flat,
sandy beaches are a haven for birders looking for a day or a week of
birding. Even on a bad day a scope can pick out many varieties of ducks
and gulls from the bluff at Baccaro Point, just north of Cape Sable
Island. The Cape Sable IBA is billed by Nova Scotia’s birding authority, Blake Maybank, as the “finest year-round accessible birding locale in Nova Scotia.” Mud flats between Cape Sable Island and The Cape, a nearby island with a lighthouse, provide rich feeding grounds, and the geography of the island provides a natural funnel to attract pelagic and migratory birds. In the past two years, the IBA Local Action Committee has erected interpretive signs at Daniel’s Head and The Hawk, organized the first Brant Festival in eastern North America, and operated a staffed welcome centre, which hosted two week-long children’s nature camps this past summer. While the future of the Brant Festival and nature camps are unclear, the birds will no doubt return in their impressive numbers during their annual migration. So this winter grab your cold-weather gear and a hot beverage and enjoy the excellent birding at Cape Sable. Cathy Holmes is a writer based in Middle Ohio, Shelburne County, NS.
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