The first mosquito landed on me at 2:55 a.m. As it turned out, it wasn’t trying to bite me. It just wanted to get warm. That often happens during my team’s annual birdathon. The alarm goes off at 1 a.m., and we’re in the woods looking for owls by 2. Often, it’s frigid.
My birdathon team is called the Cardinal Sins. We strive to find at least 120 species of birds in one day in Greater Bangor. By rule, teams can go out for 24 hours, but our team can’t seem to stay awake beyond 20, except for my wife, Sandi, whose motto is “C’mon, just one more bird!”
And so it was that our team of three assembled in Orono at 2 a.m. on Memorial Day and struck off for the County Road in Milford, a favorite place to look for owls. We found exactly none – the first time in two decades of Cardinal Sin history that we got skunked.
At 2:16 a.m. our first bird sounded off in the darkness. The ovenbird sounded like it was farting through a flute. When the sun comes up, every ovenbird sounds alike, singing “teacher, teacher, teacher.” But before dawn, this ground-dwelling warbler chirps some things I barely recognize. Who knew?
After 90 minutes of chilling darkness, we had identified only two birds. No owls. No snipe. No hope. Fortunately, several miles east of Milford, the Stud Mill Road is full of whip-poor-wills and woodcocks. The horizon was brightening as we reached the spot, and by 4 a.m., the dawn chorus was in full-throated chaos.
Over the din, we thought we heard a distant owl. We turned onto a side road and were immediately confronted by a mourning warbler singing loudly. This secretive songbird is an uncommon breeder in Maine’s north woods, and it is downright rare near Bangor. I’ve been trying to find one along the Stud Mill Road for ten years without success. And here it was. Kah-CHING!
By 4:30 sunrise, the number of identified birds reached 18, and then doubled again over the next half hour. Some birds were precisely where they were supposed to be. In Bangor City Forest, northern waterthrushes, Canada warblers, and Lincoln’s sparrows were in their usual places. On Kittredge Road near the Bangor Mall, a cowbird was on the same lawn as it was last year. An indigo bunting was perched up in exactly the same tree.
We were picking up speed as we approached the mall, even grabbing birds out the car window: a drive-by mockingbird on the roof of Target, house finches singing above Starbucks, ring-billed gulls on the mall lawn. The day may have started slowly, but if we could find a hundred birds by noon, we’d be on the way to a good score.
We didn’t. The team charged around the wetland at Essex Woods in Bangor, racking up easy birds like Baltimore oriole and warbling vireo, plus tough birds like black-billed cuckoo and blue-gray gnatcatcher, but missing some of the usual residents, such as pied-billed grebe and green heron. We often hear a sora, but this secretive rail remained silent. By the time we finished our lap at 11 a.m., we had identified 90 birds, and we would add only seven more before noon. We needed a boost.
We didn’t get one. A bluebird, purple finch and rose-breasted grosbeak at Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden put the team at the century mark, but it was now 1 p.m. We would spend the next several hours missing key targets. If there was an eastern meadowlark anywhere in eastern Maine, we couldn’t find it. There are five swallows that breed locally. We found only two. By 5 p.m., we had merely managed to identify 109 species. Things were looking grim.
And then, suddenly things got wild. At our ocean stop, we picked up five more species. At one mudflat, we put six shorebirds on the list, including a breeding plumage red knot. That’s a rare, federally threatened species. We stopped at a pond, and there stood a black-crowned night-heron, a rare, state endangered species. We stopped at another wetland near Schoodic Point, and as I stepped to the edge, a small, greenish wading bird flushed. A least bittern! That’s even rarer than the night-heron! It was to be our 125th bird of the day.
There are a lot of birds that can be found in Maine if you know where to look. Or if you’re just plain lucky.
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.