ONE SPECIES?!?!
On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 2:23 PM, Doug Hitchcox <dhitchcox@mac.com> wrote:
Hey everyone:
I just wanted to send a belated report about the awesome day I had last Saturday, May 17th, during Maine Audubon's Bird-a-thon. This is an annual fundraiser in which teams of birders compete to see as many species as possible within a 24 hours period in the state of Maine. This year I formed a new team, the "Sub-adult Twitchers", that was made up of Fyn Kynd, Mathias Deming, Abby McBride, Traczie Bellinger, and myself - an energetic and sharp group of some of Maine's "younger" birders. Our route will remain a team-secret but I did want to share a few of the highlights from the day:
We were optimistic when it wasn't raining at 3AM but the more we traveled and searched out owls at "reliable" locations, the worse the weather got. Breezy winds and increasing precipitation left us owl-less by sun-up. We even missed the ever present Snowy Owl at Biddeford Pool which another team did see later in the day.
Most seaducks were easy ticks from East Point Sanctuary (Biddeford) but the building waves kept some IDs a mystery. We booked it inland to Sanford where Fyn quickly spotted a Sora on the edge of the cattails and was nice enough to vocalize for the whole group. Dabblers were hard to come by, especially with the gates locked, but a few shorebirds and a great swallow show helped raise our spirits in what turned out to be the heaviest rain of the day.
Kennebunk Plains was one of our most productive stops: Prairie Warblers, Field Sparrows, and Grasshopper Sparrows were very vocal from Maguire Road while an Upland Sandpiper was displaying overhead. The wettest Vesper Sparrow I've ever seen made for a fun study from Webber Hill Road.
A few secret stops on the way to the Scarborough Marsh slowly boosted our total count. At Dunstan Landing (Scarborough) we saw the sun for the first time and a few cool birds that we can't count toward our total. The [presumed] Snowy Egret x Tricolored Heron (hybrid) was foraging in the panne directly across Rt 9 from the nature center and a continuing [presumed] Gadwall x Mallard (hybrid) was showing nicely from the end of Dunstan Landing Road. For the record, we didn't see a pure Tricolored Heron or Gadwall all day...
Various points around Portland finally added some much needed warblers that had eluded us all day. The joy of finally birding in the sun and warmth seemed to slow us down and put us off schedule from our original route. A quick stop in Belgrade yielded all our targets around Messalonskee Lake; at least three Sandhill Cranes were near the boat launch on the south end of the lake. We ended the day using Mathias' local knowledge of the Augusta area to clean up some major gaps in our list.
We ended the day with 122 species (+2 non-countable taxa) with some "easy birds" missing from our list. Kudos to the other teams that were out on an otherwise unpleasant day. I know there were several York County Audubon teams tearing up their county, the Mighty Marsh Muckers beat us by one species(!!), and Becky Marvel's carbon-free big-day turned up an impressive 50 species just around her neighborhood. Great job everyone!
Thank you to everyone who participated and to those who supported the teams! Your donations help to improve and expand the work Maine Audubon is able to do. Thank you and good birding.
Doug Hitchcox
Staff Naturalist
Maine Audubon
207-781-2330 x237
dhitchcox@maineaudubon.org
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maine-birds@googlegroups.com
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https://sites.google.com/site/birding207
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