Keep Calm and Bird On: March 2021

Ginger Andrews • March 1, 2021
“If you don’t look, you don’t see. You have to go and look.”
-Edith Andrews

March can be a formidable time to go birding. Warm sunny calm days are few, interspersed with gales of wind, rain, or the occasional surprise blizzard—but it also carries the promise of Spring. March is when we look for the first American Oystercatchers (see below) to return from Cedar Key, other parts of Florida, or even as far south as Honduras. Impervious to the chill, they will be returning home, looking for mates, territory, or just replenishing their reserves from the trip.

It’s also a great time to catch birds before they head north. What’s missing from your list of winter visitors? Long-tailed Ducks need a bit more effort this year, but they can be found in small numbers, cruising past Codfish Park. They are more or less continuously molting, so check out the different plumages as males and females alter their seasonal patterns of black and white. Razorbills also reward a persistent sea-watcher. And it usually takes a telescope, but a few Harlequin Ducks can sometimes be picked out among the Scoters at Quidnet or Hoick’s Hollow.


Pond ducks that might begin to be feeling a bit restless include Canvasbacks, Redheads, Ring-necked Ducks, Greater and Lesser Scaup, and of course our favorite perennial rarity, the Tufted Duck. American Coot are also going to be picking up stakes soon.

Ospreys (see above) will be coming back too, usually around the third week of March. One has consistently reclaimed its nest pole every year on the 24th. These powerful, magnificent birds travel thousands of miles each year. They waste no time when they get back, rebuilding the nest as part of their annual courtship.


So bundle up and remember what the Irish say: there’s no bad weather, just improper dressin’.

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Maria Mitchell In Her Own Words

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • June 16, 2025
June 1851 My Dear Sister . . . . Mrs. Dassel has painted me kneeling at my telescope. It looks like Adeline Coffin and is of course not handsome. If thee was here thee would have Mitchell’s {William Mitchell Barney, son of Sally and Matthew Barney} painted at once. She has a head of a child N. P. Willis that is very lovely. She has taken a room at the Atheneum and put up about a dozen pictures – very beautiful – Isabel is lovely. She has not tried to make a portrait, but a very pretty picture . . . . She is now engaged on Abra’m Quary – he is much flattered by it and it will be a fine portrait. I think we shall buy it or a copy for the Atheneum . . . . She will paint father also for herself – having made a pencil sketch . . . .We like her very much . . . . The above is from a letter sent by Maria Mitchell to her eldest sister, Sally Mitchell Barney. In it, Maria details what everyone in the Mitchell family is up to. She includes some details about Herminia B. Dassel, an artist who came to Nantucket to paint the last Native Americans and also took an interest in the famous Mitchell family. This was of course four years after Maria’s discovery of the comet. At the time of this letter, Maria was still the librarian for the Atheneum and the portrait of Quary that she mentions possibly buying for the Atheneum, she did buy as it hangs in the Atheneum by the front door today. Another Dassel portrait of Quary is in the collection of the Nantucket Historical Association and the portrait of Isabel Draper is currently on display at the NHA’s Whaling Museum – on loan from a museum in Rhode Island. The portrait Maria states she posed for at the start of the letter is in the collection of the MMA. It was given to us in the early 1990s by Sally’s great granddaughter – the granddaughter of Mitchell whom she mentions above as well. Maria and Dassel would become good friends – Maria was named the godmother of Dassel’s daughter. And the sketch of William made by Dassel that Maria states would become a portrait? It likely did come to fruition. It made its way down a side of the family but was unfortunately lost, likely sold as part of a family estate though we do have a photograph of it and one can tell it is the brush work of Dassel. JNLF

At Long Last!

By Jascin N. Leonardo Finger • June 9, 2025
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