If you are a football fan and your quarterback makes an amazing touchdown pass . . . the crowd goes wild . . . then you notice a yellow flag on the field . . . holding. The touchdown is disallowed and you feel deflated. That happened to me today. This morning I was birding […]
SANDPIPER. The word brings forth an image of childhood with little birds running at the edge of the surf on a hot summer beach day. And that image is pretty accurate, as right now thousands of sandpipers and plovers are migrating through Maine, stopping to feed on coastal beaches. But there are other Sandpipers . […]
Birders come in all shapes, sizes and ages. There are old fogies (like myself), the academic ornithological types (“notice the rufous upper-wing coverts”), the matronly fanatics (made famous by Miss Jane Hathaway on the Beverly Hillbillies) . . . and then there are the young turks!!! This later group is made up of some amazing “kids”. […]
Yesterday was Wednesday and for Ingrid and me . . . it was another whale watch . . . this time out of Boothbay Harbor. Once again we treated with the variety of sea birds moving around the boat and bored tourist (it can take several hours to get to the whales) peppering us with […]
Regular readers of my Maine Big Year Chronicles (Hi Uncle Bob and Aunt Avis), know how important sea birds are. I’m not talking about the gulls and ducks that prowl the coastline . . . I’m talking about the great ocean going birds that live their entire lives at sea, often migrating halfway around the […]
NOTE: THIS POST WAS WRITTEN ON AUGUST 1 BUT HELD UNTIL TODAY . . . READ ON TO FIND OUT WHY!!!! A couple days ago . . . Ingrid and I drove two and half hours north to Bar Harbor for a Whale Watch (excellent birding on Whale Watches) and it was canceled due to […]
Yesterday Ingrid and I came upon a flock of Black-legged Kittiwakes sitting on a rock outcrops off the Quoddy Head Lighthouse in Lubec. Lubec is the eastern most point in the United States and believe it or not, is the closer to Africa than Florida (I don’t understand that either but apparently its true). The […]
Back in January I stood with a group of birder in ankle deep snow trying to stay warm as we waited for a rare Black-headed Grosbeak to appear. A birder who set the Maine Big Year record back in 2011 was providing me helpful hints . . . when he came to the one […]
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