Mothman on Cape Cod?

Have there been any sightings of Mothman at the end of Cape Cod lately? We don’t think so, but there are new encounters with the bird that skeptics initially blamed as the source of the Mothman accounts in 1966-1967 in Point Pleasant, West Virginia.

For the past week, sightings and even photographs have been taken of a lone sandhill crane (Grus canadensis) near Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Boston area newspapers have reported that the bird has been spotted foraging for a food around a soccer field near Route 6 and also close to the P-Town airport.

“It is a strikingly good-looking bird,” Joseph F. Cavanaugh III, a Mashpee attorney and bird enthusiast who photographed the crane last weekend told the Boston Herald.

The sandhill crane’s prolonged appearance in Provincetown is rare for the Outer Cape, but sightings of the species in the region have increased over the past five years, said local bird expert E. Vernon Laux, a naturalist for the Linda Loring Nature Foundation on Nantucket. Records of a few sandhill cranes spending the winter in places such as Cummaquid and Wareham are known.

The Lesser Sandhill Crane (Grus canadensis canadensis), photographed in British Columbia.

Perhaps it is an artifact of the media, in general, link between October, Halloween, and creatures – or a result of the recent Mothman Festival (see “Ninth Annual Mothman Festival draws record numbers“), but there has been a recent rash of Mothman sightings in the blogosphere, that’s for sure.

Loren Coleman About Loren Coleman
Loren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct). Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015. Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

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