Birds and Birding at Mount Auburn Cemetery

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is celebrating its 175th anniversary this year. A national historic landmark, the cemetery has been a mecca for birds and bird watchers since its founding. Mount Auburn Cemetery is the nation’s first garden cemetery and played a significant role as a model for urban parks across the country. Even before its creation, young Harvard students would stroll the area to observe and collect birds.

Bostonians founded Mount Auburn Cemetery in 1831 for both practical and aesthetic reasons: to provide a better option for the increasing number of burials and to create a beautiful natural setting where families could commemorate their loved ones. Mount Auburn quickly became the model for the “rural” cemetery movement that inspired public parks and open space planning across the country. Today, the cemetery draws over 200,000 visitors a year, many of them avid bird watchers. Its 175 landscaped acres feature over 5,300 trees representing over 630 taxa as well as an historic collection of 19th, 20th and 21st century architecture and memorials.

The cemetery has had a bird committee almost from its beginning. In 1870, the committee put together a list of trees and plants to be introduced that were attractive to birds. Its prominence as a site for bird watching was recognized in 2002 by the Massachusetts Audubon Society, when it was designated an Important Bird Area in Massachusetts.

The following excerpts are taken from the 32-page guidebook, Birds and Birding at Mount Auburn Cemetery by Christopher Leahy.

Most of the birds that pour through Mount Auburn in spring - and to a lesser extent in fall - are Neotropical migrants. For the great majority the Cemetery is not a final destination but a waystation, a place to rest and feed en route from their wintering grounds - mainly in Mexico, Central America, northern South America, and the Caribbean Islands - to nesting grounds that are often far to the north in the forests of Canada. Most of the species involved - including 60% of those that nest in Massachusetts - feed mainly on insects or fruit and nectar and therefore must retreat to the tropics, not to escape cold weather, as many people believe, but rather to find a reliable winter food supply.

It is known from recoveries of birds that have been banded that individual birds of a given species return each year to precise nesting and wintering territories and often stop in the same place en route. The Wood Thrush one sees in Mount Auburn this year may be one of the same ones one watched last year close to the same date; it is on its way to its traditional nesting area, perhaps in Vermont or Quebec, and will return to a familiar wintering ground, possibly in the (dwindling) rain forest of Southern Mexico.

Why is it then that Mount Auburn and other so-called “migrant traps” seem to act as magnets for birdlife during migration? As usual there are several answers. Among the navigational aids used by migratory birds are the prevailing winds of the season. In spring, birds arriving from the Neotropics ride southwest tailwinds to their destinations, while in the fall, their course is partly determined by weather fronts from the Northwest. Because prevailing winds don’t always prevail, migrants tend to bunch up ahead of fronts thus creating a pattern of migrant “waves” arriving with some regularity every ten days or so during peak periods. This weather pattern is not universal, of course, and “warbler waves” are most dramatic in eastern North America. Migrants also tend to concentrate along “leading lines” such as coasts and river valleys. Land birds migrating along the eastern seaboard will often find themselves foraging on peninsulas and barrier islands, which funnel them into prime copses and cul-de-sacs at land’s end; this explains why Cape May in New Jersey and Plum Island and Marblehead Neck in Massachusetts are legendary migrant traps.

Mount Auburn Cemetery lies just 1.5 miles from the coast and nestles in a bend of the Charles River, and these features doubtless help lead weary migrants to the respite of the cemetery. This island-of-green-in-a-sea-of-cement theory seems borne out by the fact that it is a relatively recent phenomenon, coinciding with the simultaneous urbanization of the Cambridge and Watertown area and reforestation of Mount Auburn.

Exploring Mount Auburn is rewarding any time of the year; different seasons, weather conditions and times of day seem to reveal previously undiscovered vistas, moods and details. There is no point in denying that birds (and birders!) are most abundant and diverse in “high spring” (late April to early June), but each season brings its own special avian (and other) highlights.

The Birding Year-at-a-Glance

January in Mount Auburn belongs to the year-round inhabitants, what the birders call “permanent residents.” These are species - seed- and berry- eaters, predators and scavengers - adept at eking out a living when the abundant food supplies of summer are locked up in the frozen earth or secreted in crannies of rock and tree trunk. Three kinds of gulls commuting overhead to and from the nearby ocean; scrounging American Crows and European Starlings sauntering over the snow in search of edible morsels; expert gleaners such as Downy Woodpeckers, Black-capped Chickadees, Tufted Titmice, White-breasted Nuthatches and Blue Jays; Northern Cardinals, American Goldfinches, House Finches and House Sparrows that thrive on weed and grass seeds even when the Cemetery’s feeders are empty; berry pickers - Cedar Waxwings, American Robins and Northern Mockingbirds gorging on the abundant fruits of ornamental trees and shrubs; and perched on the peak of the food pyramid the predators - Red-tailed Hawks, Eastern Screech and Great Horned owls, foraging on the foragers.

The end of February brings the earliest avian harbingers of spring when the first male Red-winged Blackbirds sing broken calliope concertos from the tops of still budless trees.

By mid March newly arrived American Robins from further south join the wintering population in gleaning the first invertebrates from the thawing earth, Northern Flickers peck the ground in search of savory ants, Killdeers - plovers of the urban wards - announce their arrival by wailing their names, and in the last week of the month the first fly-eaters, Eastern Phoebes and Tree Swallows, appear near the ponds.

April brings a small vanguard of species - Yellow-bellied Sapsucker, Ruby-crowned Kinglet, Blue-gray Gnatcatcher, Hermit Thrush, and Yellow-rumped and Palm Warblers as a foretaste of the great feathered swarms from the Neotropics that will begin to slip in by night at the end of the month.

May is Mount Auburn’s glory month, when its flowery bowers seem stuffed to the bursting point with hummingbirds and flycatchers and thrushes and vireos and tanagers and orioles and, above all, warblers - at least 25 species in dazzling breeding plumage, filling the spring air with their songs (though seldom warbling!).

In June the last Blackpolls and Mourning Warblers pass along to the North and a summer calm sets in, presided over by Mount Auburn’s breeding birds. These include the permanent residents, of course, but also those species that rear their young in the Cemetery - feeding them on insects - but retreat to the south when their prey succumbs to winterkill: Chimney Swift, Belted Kingfisher, Great Crested Flycatcher, Warbling and Red-eyed Vireos, Yellow Warbler, Chipping and Song Sparrows, Common Grackle, Baltimore Oriole and a few less common or less conspicuous species.

By July many of the nestlings have left the nest and birders are rare; the most obsessive Auburnite might visit the Cemetery’s Tower and hope to add a shorebird migrating overhead to the birder’s list—perhaps a Short-billed Dowitcher en route from the Yukon to the Argentine pampas.

By mid August the first of the fall songbird migrants, e.g. Blue-winged Warblers and Northern Waterthrushes, begin to slip through quietly on the way to their tropical wintering grounds.

The fall passage of these insectivores, which peaks in September, is less spectacular than its vernal counterpart; though more birds are involved, due to a new crop of juveniles, the migration is more protracted, and lacks the bright costumes and musical accompaniment of the spring pageant. The confusing fall warblers constitute a kind of Birder’s Achievement Test: can you tell an immature Blackpoll from a Bay-breast? Or decipher a “mouse Cape May”? Or see the eye-ring well enough to “call” a Connecticut?

October is sparrow month. The leaf litter and weedy patches attract White-throats among which the rarer White-crowned, Field, Swamp, Fox, and Lincoln’s can be sought.

The first “snowflakes” (Dark-eyed Juncos) arrive in November and settle in for the winter along with those other boreal seedeater, the Tree Sparrows. In rare flight years when northern seed crops are thin, this is also the season to watch for rare finches such as crossbills, redpolls and Pine or Evening Grosbeaks.

By mid December the solsticial quiet - and perhaps a blanket of snow - has settled over Mount Auburn. Only the feeder area is busy and the Cemetery returns to the care of the chickadees, cardinals, crows, and its other full time tenants.

We ask you to visit Mount Auburn in person or on line at www.mountauburn.org. We also invite you to join the Friends of Mount Auburn Cemetery and to participate in its programs and activities. Membership information is available at the cemetery and on the web.