This, after all, was the 40th anniversary of the Cape Cod Bird Club’s Waterfowl Census, and they would not be denied their ducks.

That big, lemming-loving Arctic bird has finally been sighted again on Cape Cod. Just in from some tundra breeding ground in northern Canada or Alaska, this fierce and seldom-seen raptor of big, open areas is getting local birders excited for winter, with sightings of different birds in Dennis and Orleans.

I’ve been on enough offshore boat trips in fall that I’ve seen someone with an actual oriole on their baseball cap.

As so often happens, Facebook brought us word of the latest rare bird. A post in the Cape Cod Birders group on Monday showed clear photos of a hawk that, in the parlance of its native lands, ain’t from around these parts.

Though we’re back to short-sleeve weather and barely a leaf has reached the ground, I assure you it is indeed late October, which means that All Hallows Eve is upon us.

Lately I’ve been looking for birds in a small community garden near my daughter’s school in Orleans — as we saw with last week’s state-first Virginia’s Warbler, community gardens can yield a bountiful bird harvest in fall.

Ornithologist Mark Faherty says the fall season of rare bird sightings on Cape Cod has just started.

On Monday morning, as my son and I walked to the bus stop a little before 7, I was already hearing warblers. Specifically, I was hearing the flight calls these little songbirds give during migration.

I finally have a little time to watch birds each day, and it’s all thanks to the Monomoy School District. Between my kindergarten-aged son’s absurdly early bus time of 6:52 AM and the time we have to get my daughter up for pre-school, I have one deliciously unstructured hour.

Hurricane, then Tropical Storm, then “Post-Tropical Cyclone” Lee has come and gone. Lee barely grazed us with some ho-hum 50 mph gusts that downed a few trees, having passed well to our east. But how did it score in storm-birding terms?

Birders are all secretly hoping Lee comes, and that Lee is bringing lots of gifts in the form of rare, storm-blown birds.

Hundreds of thousands of shorebirds and seabirds breed, feed, and rest on Chatham’s barrier beaches. Importantly for these ISS surveys, thousands of normally kinetic shorebirds take a break from feeding to rest in certain parts of Monomoy during the high tide, at which point they are relatively easy to count.

Fall migration is an Irish goodbye – by the time you notice you’re not hearing the catbirds anymore, they’ve been gone two weeks.

Rhode Island is no slouch in the rare bird game - places like the Charlestown Breachway, Napatree Point, and Block Island have produced many a rarity that sent Massachusetts birders speeding down I-95.

I highly recommend paying attention to the bees visiting your yard. Just like with birding, you never know what you may find. Some tiny bees I noticed visiting male winterberry at Wellfleet Bay sanctuary last month turned out to be armored resin bees, a group never before recorded on the Cape and Islands.

As we round the corner of mid-summer, with Labor Day now dimly visible at the horizon, it’s time you got serious about shorebirds.

The bird was indeed a plover, but not the one they were tasked with watching. This was a Mountain Plover, a scarce species of the high, dry plains east of the rockies, and one that eluded me thus far in my birding career.

It’s now high season for that traditional tourist activity, the whale watch. Us jaded locals probably don’t take advantage of this activity enough, though we live in one of just a handful of places in North America where it’s easy to see whales close to land.

It’s summertime on the Cape’s beaches, which for me always brings to mind that famous old song about seabirds – Tern! Tern! Tern! At least I assume it’s about the seabirds – it’s by the Byrds, after all.

This past weekend, the wife and I packed up the kids and headed west, bound for adventure in the exotic lands beyond the bridges. As much as I love the Cape, I need to head to places with richer woods and bigger wildlife now and again.

In the birding calendar, late June is a great time to sit back, relax and watch some chicks.

Last week, full of foolish confidence, I declared that migration was over. This week’s report is about various migrants that are still passing through.

I am officially calling it – spring migration is over. With migrating birds, as with people, there are always stragglers and wanderers who keep things interesting, but for all intents and purposes, it’s now simply breeding season.

This week on The Bird Report, the connection between horseshoe crabs and red knots.