Geoff Dennis took this photo during a migratory fallout on Monhegan Island. On May 17, 2011, flocks of warblers, flying over the Gulf of Maine on their way to northern forests, were caught in severe weather and made an emergency landing. Many ended up on the beach. “You could see their wet feathers, and you knew that they were suffering,” said Dennis. “It’s dumb luck when that happens to them. They hit the weather wrong.”
Dennis has witnessed fallouts on several occasions, including his first spring on the island in 1995. He recalled his first encounter with forest warblers on the beach. They were sluggish from cold and seemed desperate for food:
“It was pretty windy out of the west. I’m a fisherman so I thought to myself, well, heck, I’ll roll the wrack line. The flies will come out, blow off the beach in the wind. It will be like a chum line.
And sure enough, that’s what happened. [I called] my wife – we had little two-way radios back then. I said, ‘Emily, you’ve got to come down and sit next to me.’ We sat down. There was a big piling – a piece of a telephone pole – and she sat next to me on it. And I would just roll the wrack line – the seaweed – with my foot and the flies would come flying out and these warblers would cue in on it. They just literally came to my feet after a time…
…There was a sharp-shinned hawk that would occasionally make a run. We were sitting there on the pole side-by-side. The warblers would go underneath our legs.”
Geoff Dennis, a professional photographer and commercial fisherman, lives in Little Compton, Rhode Island. He volunteers with The Nature Conservancy of Rhode Island, helping to identify and protect piping plover nest sites.
Web Extras
So what does Geoff Dennis do when he’s not flushing flies for migratory warblers? We recently published an interview with him, as part of our new “Community Voices” series, made possible through generous support from the Larsen Fund. Follow this link to learn about his photography and impressive volunteer work for other birds on the beach, piping plovers.
We have also included some additional migratory fallout photographs from Dennis, below.
