Hey everyone:
The recent drop in temps seemed to also drop a few birds from Gilsland Farm during the walk today. Ice has taken over most of the river again, limiting us to 22 species for the morning - down from 29 during last Saturday's heat spell. Any day now we will break 30 again; both temperature and species would be nice...
The variety of songs have certainly increased and the first real drumming we've heard this year from Downy Woodpeckers was welcoming. The best sign of spring though was the emergence of a solo groundhog (Marmota monax) in the West Meadow. Chris Maher reported seeing the first signs of this individual two days ago.
Avian highlights are hard to come by in late February but a Common Raven calling from Gilsland Farm airspace was a bit of a surprise. They are not rare from Gilsland but usually stick to the west side of 295. I did want to mention that we put a bit of effort into relocating the Marsh Wren that appears to be overwintering in the stand of phragmites between the West and North Meadows - no luck with the wren but it certainly doesn't appear regularly. My sightings have been: 7 Dec 2013, 18 Jan 2014, and 22 Feb 2014 all in the same stand of phrags.
A complete checklist from today's birdwalk is available at: http://ebird.org/ebird/view/checklist?subID=S17222676
And I wanted to make one extremely last minute reminder that I'll be giving part 4 of my 'Birding in a Digital Age' workshop tonight. We will focus on creating and reading spectrograms, learning some online resources for using weather to your advantage in birding, and of course more fun with eBird as time allows. More details are online at: http://maineaudubon.org/events/birding-in-a-digital-age-part-four/
Good birding,
Doug Hitchcox
Staff Naturalist
Maine Audubon
207-781-2330 x237
dhitchcox@maineaudubon.org
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