Maine Outdoor Journal

On Friday morning, I birded close to home, hitting Hedgehog Mountain Park and Florida Lake Park. Both were fairly quiet, with only widely-scattered, small pockets of migrants, princably White-throated Sparrows, Yellow-rumped Warblers, Dark-eyed Juncos, and Song Sparrows. A few Palm Warblers, Swamp Sparrows, American Robins, and Golden-crowned Kinglets were mixed in, along with a couple of Ruby-crowned Kinglets and Chipping Sparrows, but very few other migrants. With temperatures right around freezing again this morning, and a very cold and damp northeasterly wind, the air had the feel much more like November than early October.

Meanwhile, fewer White-throated Sparrows were at our home feeding station, and at the store, the number of White-throats and especially Dark-eyed Juncos was greatly reduced from yesterday.

So, it had seemed that a major exodus had occurred overnight, and therefore I was shocked when I looked at the radar images. Although the early morning images had less activity than the evening images, there was a lot more activity than I would have expected - especially given the switch from light north to increasing NNE winds and cloudy skies as the night progressed. Here are the 10pm, 12am, 2am, and 4am radar images, and the 10pm velocity image to illustrate the nice NE to SW flow of migrants last night.









A moderate flight Friday night into Saturday also saw more birds departing than arriving, and with light NNE winds by dawn, fewer migrants were concentrated along the coast come morning.








However, our Saturday Morning Birdwalk group enjoyed a decent smattering of migrants, primarily sparrows of course, on our visit to Freeport’s Wolfe’s Neck Farm, with the highlight being a tardy Northern Parula.

The season is certainly progressing rapidly, as migrant diversity is dwindling, and the short-distant migrants are now dominating. There’s no sign of any irruptions yet, but waterfowl numbers and diversity is rapidly picking up. With below-normal temperatures and some rain and/or snow events over the course of the next few days, I would expect feeder-bird activity to pick up even more dramatically. Also, with early-season cold snaps, be aware of oddities at feeders, such as late-linger warblers and maybe even a vagrant showing up on things like suet, mealworms, and other supplemental food sources that can be quite popular at this time of year.

Sparrows are certainly arriving en masse to feeding stations throughout the area as well. Our recently-expanded feeding station at the store, with its new retaining wall, has become quite a hit with sparrows and other ground feeders. We’re liberally sprinkling white millet on the ground twice a day, and a small brush pile has been added that has become most popular for retreating sparrows. Each week, we post our tallies of feeder birds at our store’s feeding station to our website, both for general interest, but also so folks can compare the changes we see to what you’re seeing in your yard. This week’s list has been one of our more impressive totals so far at the new store.

As we usually do in our store’s fall newsletter, we remind people to keep their hummingbird feeders up in October, and to call us if ANYTHING visits them. Although a few late, straggling Ruby-throats occur in Maine every October, with each passing day, a hummingbird in Maine is more and more likely to be a vagrant. So far this year, we have only received one report – of an imm/female Ruby-throated Hummingbird at a feeder in Topsham for three days this past week. Unfortunately, with what appears to have been a very poor breeding season for our hummers, there just seems to be very few juveniles that are the most likely to dally into October. But, keep your eyes peeled – a Rufous Hummingbird, Black-chinned Hummingbird, or Calliope Hummingbird may just be out there somewhere!

So, I am off to New Jersey for a week, beginning on Saturday afternoon. I had hoped that the Brown-chested Martin in Massachusetts would stick around until I ventured south, but that bird has either departed or succumbed to the cold snap. Unlike most of my trips down to the Motherland, I will not be visiting family, etc, but instead this trip is all about business. I’ll be spending a few days with David LaPuma of woodcreeper.com followed by a few days in Cape May hanging out with Cameron Cox on the Higbee Beach Morning Flight Project for a writing project that I am working on. Hopefully, the weather will cooperate and I’ll be able to study and enjoy a couple of good late-season migrant flights.

While I’m out of town, I am sure something great will turn up in Maine. But, Cape May isn’t a shabby place to be in the middle of October, either! But, since I love October birding in Maine so much, this is a difficult time for me to pull away.

I’ll be back just in time for our 6-hr dedicated pelagic on Saturday, 10/24. We have enough people signed up for this trip to go, but of course, we want to fill the boat! I’m really looking forward to this outing, as it is my best chance (and yours!) yet to see a Great Skua in Maine. For more information, visit the Travels, Tours, and Workshops Page of our website.

And I’ll leave you with this great little story about the “San Clemente” Loggerhead Shrike that is single-handily trying to save his own (sub)species!