Success makes a good story, but failure is much more interesting. Failure is a common theme whenever my birdathon team makes its once-a-year quest to find 130 birds in one day. This was the 16th year that the Cardinal Sins assembled at 2 a.m. to search for nocturnal birds.
A birdathon, also called a Big Day, can last up to 24 hours. Teams compete to identify as many species as possible. Our local rules are lax. Team numbers can vary. Teams pick their own dates and routes. Team members must stay within earshot of each other and jointly observe the birds, mostly.
We started strong. At 2:23 a.m., a distant whip-poor-will calling along County Road in Milford became the day’s first bird. Whip-poor-wills have declined in Maine, but there are still quite a few on the dirt roads around Sunkhaze Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.
Owls are the prime nighttime targets. Barred owls have big voices that can be heard for a considerable distance, and we tallied one easily. Saw-whet owls are tiny. Their toot-toot calls can be difficult to hear. Huzzah: we heard one at 2:45 a.m., and then another, and a third. The pressure was off.
By 3 a.m., we had heard five species, including woodcocks, night-hawks and an ovenbird, perhaps talking in its sleep. As the horizon began to glow, the dawn chorus gathered strength. By 4 a.m., we had identified 13 species, while seeing none. By 5 a.m., we were up to 45 species, and we added eight more during the next hour. By 7 a.m., we’d notched 77 species.
We were doing well, but there was ominous foreboding. In an area bursting with American bitterns, we found none. Known locations for boreal chickadees and a Cape May warbler were silent. We missed winter wrens. Ducks disappointed.
Here’s one I can’t explain. Tennessee warblers are northern songbirds, seldom seen in Bangor. This year, they’ve been dropping into back yards and lingering. One has hung around my house for weeks. During our foray about town, we heard many. Something weird is going on.
A brisk walk around Essex Woods in Bangor yielded many expected birds but missed several others. My anxiety grew, although we were enjoying our fastest rate of success ever. On a good day, we hope to find 100 species by noon. We achieved that milestone before 10:30 a.m. Awesome.
Then the wind came up, rising with the Memorial Day temperatures. A hush fell upon the birds. A dependable pair of Eastern meadowlarks hid. Cliff swallows failed to return to their traditional home under the Stillwater Bridge in Orono. Dozens of noisy winter wrens in Bangor City Forest went silent. We were losing ground, losing time, and we needed to reach a particular coastal mudflat by 1:30 p.m. or miss the tide for shorebirds. Yikes.
We arrived at the mudflat just in the nick of time, but the anticipated flock of shorebirds was distant. Through the spotting scope, we could positively identify many black-bellied plovers, but two skinnier birds among them might have been red knots. We were too far to be certain, so we couldn’t count them. We had hoped for five species, but managed only one.
Crestfallen, we headed for Schoodic Point, where we were sure to find multiple targets as long as the wind wasn’t howling from the southwest …
The howling southwest wind at Schoodic swept the ocean clean. The only new tally after an hour’s search wasn’t even a seabird. A dark-eyed junco got us to 114, and we were miles away from our next targets. Worse, it was almost 6 p.m. when we reached a favorite patch of forest where I’d never before failed to find eastern towhees, until now. They’d gone to bed.
Panic and nightfall set in simultaneously, but there was still hope. We had already staked out a wood thrush in Eddington. They will sing into evening, and only one thing could go wrong.
Peepers. After a cold weekend, Memorial Day was warm. Every peeper on the planet was chirping at the top of its tiny lungs. When we got to the spot, the peepers were as loud as a Waterfront Concert. Miraculously, we heard the thrush over the din well enough to count our final bird. No great horned owl, no Virginia rail, both drowned out by peepers.
We had started the day as strong as the Red Sox of April, and we ended as weakly as the Red Sox of May, falling eight short of our goal. Failure. But fun!
Bob Duchesne serves as vice president of Maine Audubon’s Penobscot Valley Chapter. He developed the Maine Birding Trail, with information at mainebirdingtrail.com. He can be reached at duchesne@midmaine.com.