I went out to check various spots of the Scarborough Marsh this afternoon after work and saw my FOY Snowy Egret at Dunstan Landing and 11 Gadwall behind Perelco.
As sundown approached, I searched the Industrial park off Rte 1 just north of the marsh in hopes of large blackbird flocks gathering there. This weekend had lots of blackbirds on the move so it seemed like a good time to check ( almost a month behind when I witnessed this last year). As I took my first righthand turn to head towards the Gervais property across from DMM, I estimated 2000-3000 blackbirds and growing lining the trees. Grackles led the way, followed by Red-Wingeds including many females, and smaller amounts of Cowbirds and Starlings. And no, I couldn't come up with a Brewers!
When I was about to leave the industrial park, approaching a traffic light at Rte 1 with Tim Horton's on my right and the Irving across the street, a seemingly endless swarm of blackbirds made their way from behind the Irving and towards the flock that I just left. I sat at the light for about one minute while the somewhat dense to extremely dense flock continued to flow overhead. I can't claim to feel confident in quickly estimating thousands of birds accurately and don't want to throw any crazy number out there, but conservatively, there had to have been at least 3000 more birds that flew over. I took many photos with a wide angle lens of the perched birds by DMM and when I have time, I will try to get an accurate count of what was there.
Bird haahd,
Noah Gibb-Portland
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