Thursday 21 August 2014

[Maine-birds] MACHIAS SEAL ISLAND REPORT

There are still a good number of PUFFINS bringing food, albeit not all is the greatest quality.
This spell of benign weather is perfect for the Pufflings leaving every night.

The last ARCTIC TERNS (5) were seen on Tuesday. There were two (2) fledglings still here.
One chick had been flying well for over a week and hopefully left with its parents.
The second chick, about the same age as the first, was never seen testing its wings and wouldn't even fly when approached. I doubt that it could survive.
In spite of some unfortunate loses, I feel that some 12-15 Tern chicks survived to flight and were early enough to have good survival prospects.
Not huge but a pretty good season after a decade of complete reproductive failure.

Very few wanders yet, although this morning revealed a couple YELLOW RUMPED WARBLERS, 2 RED BREASTED NUTHATCHES, a handful of GOLDFINCHES and several flycatchers. LEAST and OLIVE SIDED were both noted.

A few Swallows, mainly TREE SWALLOWS, CLIFF SWALLOWS & BARN SWALLOWS have been passing through each day.
Also a few HARRIERS hunt their way through.

A couple sightings of note:

A female EIDER still guiding 3 ducklings. They are barely half grown and must have been an exceptionally late hatch.

The YELLOW CROWNED NIGHT HERON, which I thought had left, is still here. It's now been here for at least 13 days. That's a remarkable period considering that we have no Heron habitat. It's using the intertidal zone and that apparently is to its liking.

There appears to have been some feed quite local this past couple days. One instance saw the assembly of 100+ HARBOUR PORPOISE, 2 MINKE WHALES, 30+ GRAY SEALS, a couple dozen GANNETS, 1000+Gulls as well as numerous STORM PETRELS, 30+ GREAT SHEARWATERS, 10+ SOOTY SHEARWATERS & 5 MANX SHEARWATERS.

--
Maine birds mailing list
maine-birds@googlegroups.com
http://groups.google.com/group/maine-birds
https://sites.google.com/site/birding207
---
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Maine birds" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to maine-birds+unsubscribe@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

0 comments:

Post a Comment