Most of us are familiar with bird migration, the annual travel of various species from their wintering grounds to their breeding territory. Generally this means they travel north in the spring and south in the fall. But a few perform counter-intuitive post-breeding migrations . . . traveling in a direction that is difficult to explain. […]
Yesterday’s adventure in pointless bird counting took Ingrid and I back out to sea to find Shearwaters. These long winged seabirds spend their entire lives on or over the world’s oceans except when they come to land to nest and raise their young. Shearwaters are some of the world’s longest migrants . . . traveling […]
What two verbs characterize a Big Year? Travel and Wait Travel and Wait Travel and Wait Last January I stood in the freezing cold for a cumulative 10 hours before a Black-headed Grosbeak showed up in a Portland park. In May I drove five hours to Lubec (the eastern most point in the USA) and […]
Yesterday, Ingrid and I visited Katahdin Woods and Waters . . . 87,000 acres of forestland in Northern Maine. In 2016, President Obama made it a US National Monument under the Antiquities Act (I have no idea what that is). What I do know: its declaration as a national monument was quite controversial, moving a […]
It’s the beginning July and we’re at the halfway point of my Maine Big Year . . . six months to go. Bird #1 was an hour before sunrise on New Years Day . . . a Great Horned Owl calling at the Grange Hall Parking Lot in Cape Elizabeth. Bird #286 was June […]
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