 to our next presenter, Dr. Peter McKinley. So let me read a quick bio here. Dr. Peter McKinley is a research and college discussion plan project manager with the Wilderness Society based out of his office in Hollowell, Maine. His work includes development of conservation priorities for the National Wilderness Society Projects and campaigns with a particular focus on the Northern and Southern Appalachians. Previously, he was with several land trusts as permanent staff or a consultant, forest bird research groups, conservation project director with the Manomet Center for Conservation Scientists in Maine and a shorebird estuarine conservation with New Hampshire Audubon. He's also worked with forest certification programs in Maine to direct more attention to biodiversity considerations. Peter grew up on Cape Cod, we'll forgive him for that, but fell in love with Maine while at Colby College and returned to Maine as soon as he could after graduating in 1987. He also went to the Indiana University for his master's in ecology studying woodthrush and forest fragmentation and the University of New Brunswick for his doctorate in ecology studying warbler foraging ecology. Peter is the vice president of the Maine Appalachian Trail Land Trust, vice president of the High Peaks Alliance and a board member and land committee chair for the Coastal Rivers Conservation Trust. He lives in Damroscota, where he spends many happy hours paddling and sailing local waters and walking local trails as often as possible. So welcome to Peter and take it away. Thank you, I'll send a quarter of that amount next time. That's great, no, we love to hear it. Yeah, so you're all forewarned, I can carry on. So in this medium, I just wanna check, can you hear me okay and see my screen okay? Yep, you sound great, we can see you. Alrighty, and you know what I'm gonna do while we're talking? I'm going to, this was on the advice of the previous talk I gave. I play the bird sounds by the very technical method of holding up my phone to the, oh, was that audible? Did anyone hear a big nose thrush? Yes, okay, that was pretty quiet, but. Alrighty, well, I'll give it a try. Yeah, hi everybody, thanks for letting me get some of that out of the way. I figured I'd do it now and then be a little more relaxed and take the show away. I gave a presentation to fellow staffers at Wilderness Society and our IT person who's really good, best in the biz, advised me not to embed my files but hold my phone up to my speaker and I thought, wow, that's about the technological advancement that I would have chosen. So we'll give it a try, but anyway, thank you. I wish we could be together outside on this glorious day. I had the fun of maybe meeting some of you here last year on the Paramstream birding trail. It looks up at Mount Abraham, which is what I will be depicting today in a series of photos and slides and talk about the birds that we would encounter, might encounter along the way. So I'm going to, again, sorry for this, I'm minimizing, yeah, minimizing the tile so you don't see that and lose some of these great, great graphics. So as an overview, I just thought I'd give you a little roadmap or guide to today. I hope that through this know or get to know some of the birds in the landscape will touch on representative species across a gradient of elevation. The gradient is just a continuous change of conditions and in this case, elevation and soils and microclimatic conditions grow everything from black cap chickadees down lower to boreal chickadees up higher. And the structure of what I'll present will follow several stations that were part of a report I did for some high peaks conservation work, high peaks being Mount Abraham and Saddleback, Sugarloaf, Reddington and the mountains right outside of Rangeley. We borrowed that term from the Adirondacks and my colleagues in Colorado say high peaks and I say, well, we start at sea level, so give us a break anyway. And along the way, in the vein of getting to know birds we'll talk about their identification, representative birds by sight and sound, social interactions such as staking out a territorial claim, they're foraging which we just saw a great example of from Doug's little film clip, the breeding behavior, habitat, landscape. I'll define those as the time comes, landscape is not rhododendrons and the edging you do around your perennial garden but rather the patterns of vegetation and land management at typically larger scales. And I'll be talking a little bit about migration because as you'll see some of the maps show the neotropical migrants and where they spend their winter. And finally, I'll kind of put it all in a context that's related to my work, conservation and land protection priorities at multiple scales, including the whole Appalachian range. So some of these slides here, I don't know how well you can read it but there's the trip, the Mount Abraham trail. And there's me a few years ago on a Paramstream birding walk pointing to the sky or I hope a bird, Mount Abraham. Actually, I'm pointing toward Mount Abraham in this picture. There's Abraham, it's a rather dramatic change over several thousand feet of elevation from hardwood up to this, up to little patches of arctic alpine tundra, which is an arctic alpine plant, a lot of rock and in the spirit of getting to know birds and maybe getting to know me because if this were a real live bird walk, I would enjoy it because it's a chance to be personal and personable. I attempt to pull that off in some of my talks. That book, The Life of Birds, that was from a Cornell Lab of Ornithology correspondence course. Of course, now we have the internet but back when I was 11 years old, 12 years old in the early, at least 70s, I sent away and did a course in birds because I wanted to know why the robin was singing. What makes the robin sing? There's proximate how they do it with their serings, their voice box, but ultimately why are they doing that? And it turns out to be territory, territory related. It's still a little part of me that holds out that it's for sheer joy. And this other book, Nests, Eggs and Nestlings, I do not advocate collecting eggs or nests, but this is a great resource and these are just examples of the kinds of resources that if you're like me, ride around in a duffel bag in your car or truck. I started out learning birds. There's my original field guide. It's in my own personal Smithsonian. That goes back a while and doesn't leave the house anymore. I love paper field guides and I got turned on to Peterson a while back and certainly there are other guides, better guides, but Peterson is my fave and it might just be out of habit. I learned my birds by song, which is an important thing to do or skill to have when you're talking about forest birds on cassette tapes and CDs, a little representative picture there. And now of course we have apps that take the place of a field guide and audio guide. And finally, as I alluded to over to the left here in my lower bullet point, conservation and land protection priorities, John Terribourg and his associates published this book for popular consumption based on his research and the synthesis of research to date. This came on the scene in drumroll 1989, 1990. And the message is the same. Here we are a few decades later and there are some success stories for birds and conservation, but as you all have seen no doubt and are aware bird conservation and conservation of everything is a serious consideration and concern. And it's in the context of climate change, but long before climate change, we were worried about fragmentation and reduction of habitat, overall net loss subdivision of habitat. And that's where this book spoke a lot about woodthrush declines and other neotropical migratory songbirds declining and trying to understand the relative roles of the breeding versus the wintering grounds. I'll talk about three orders of birds today. This might seem kind of doll ho taxonomy. It's museum stamp collecting, but not really, it's the basis for understanding relationships of the evolutionary history and the ongoing story of birds behaving and using sharp pointy beaks or swimming or flying for their food, being a fly catcher. They go out into the air column and grab some food. A leaf cleaner like a warbler is picking from the leaf side, sometimes the underside, sometimes preferentially the top sides of leaves. The woodpeckers are wrapping at trees and licking bark. But of course, in the songbirds, you see in that red circle, there's two different families of birds. And you've got the nut hatch that specializes on picking at bark and the woodpecker that picks at bark and then indeed digs in deeper. So it's sometimes informative to understand behaviors or how a bird looks in relation to whether they are behaving and looking like a bird because they're related to the bird or because environmental pressure has made it that way. And a great example of this, and this continues in the vein of getting to know birds and how they got to be and the birds that we'll encounter on this walk of Mount Abraham. On the upper right, you see an imaginary yellow ancestor of the oven bird here and the black-throated green warbler. And both of these birds are warblers. And here in the lower left is the imaginary ancestor of the roboth rush and the woodthrush, a thrush. And as an example of convergent evolution, we have these two different lineages produced convergence in behavior, the oven bird and the woodthrush, both spend time forging in the understory and they blend in with the understory. Yet they come from different lines or different heritage. The robin, of course, comfortable on suburban lawns but also comfortable in light gaps in northern forest. And the robin song and woodthrush song sound more similar on sound. You can imagine that they have a common lineage and the oven bird and the black-throated green warbler, they, their songs are not so much a warbling but more of a buzzy mechanical. And rather than introduce their songs, I'll introduce the oven bird right now. We'll see how well it plays. So that's a mnemonic trick written up there above the oven bird, teacher, teacher, teacher, teacher. Some people are gifted and they can remember a sound without needing to file it under some kind of memory trick or mnemonic trick. But the one you'll see written in the field guides for the oven bird, so named the oven bird because it nests on the ground in a dome-shaped nest that looks kind of like a Dutch oven, I guess. Not that I've seen a lot of Dutch ovens in my time but that's the source of the name. But again, it's a warbler. And then the black-throated green warbler, that was a warbler that I studied quite a bit in one of my career chapters. And I am going to cue him up. And it's the Zuzi, Zuzi. Oh, I apologize if that's barely getting through but gave it a shot. Well, that sounds fine. Hopefully the kids will... So anyway, the Zuzi, Zuzi, Zuzi is actually written in the field guides and it's a trick to help remember the song. A woodthrush song and the robin song, I guess because they're more musical, they kind of stand on their own. So we don't have to rely as much on those clever tricks. Just a comparison of those two songs, EOLE, the woodthrush, does have a mnemonic but it's a made-up mnemonic. It's that beautiful piping sound. There are not a lot of woodthrush on the flanks and lower slopes of Mount Abraham. A little further down in the valley, in the Parham Stream Valley, I do hear woodthrush in the spring. I heard them last spring and they use mature forest and generally bigger blocks of forest. They do better, bigger contiguous blocks. And just for comparison sake, talking about the convergence and divergence, on the right we have warblers with the oven bird already discussed and the woodthrush. And looking quite a bit alike and showing the convergence on this ground foraging strategy and an effort to blend in. But on to the walk. To give you an orientation here, this is looking at it now. It's kind of old primitive graphics. I lifted this from a study that now feels like a while ago, is 2006 and it's simple and demonstrates the point that we are here in the main high peaks. I am not sure if my cursor is showing. If it's not, the high peaks are in the gold square in western Maine, northwestern Maine on the border. And that was the focus area, roughly a 200,000 acre focus area for the main Appalachian Trail and Trust, a project that I did to try to document the resources there in the diverse resources, they are natural resources, animal and plant life. I don't even want to say the user word resources. I think a timber, timber is there and that's important too, but the biodiversity was the my focus. And here is that gold square and the line, I'm tracing it, but if in case you can't see me tracing it, the maroon line that goes from Rangeley over to the left to Saddleback and then down to Phillips, that's one of the transects I did where I, for this report, took photos and inventories and so forth to document the diversity along this steep gradient, not particularly earth shattering in ecology. The gradients are a favorite predictor of biodiversity and determinant of biological diversity in all environments, many environments. Here's Mount Abraham. Again, my cursor may or may not be active, but Mount Abraham is the area we're gonna walk today, so to speak, just outside of Kingfield. You can pick up a trail, it's that purple thread and I'm going to be showing some representative birds from a walk along that trail. The bird species are there. I can't claim that I took photos of the bird species on site. However, the vegetation photos, the forest photos are photos taken from on site and it will include maps of the vegetation present at these various elevational breaks or zones. Oh my God, how did that get in there? Is this supposed to be a mountain talk? We're sitting in Hendricks Beach in West Booth Bay, a favorite spot of mine to go kayaking. That did, I put that there on purpose, actually, as you probably figured, just to demonstrate zonation and gradients and there are a couple here. There are probably more than a couple, but from the vantage point of the photographer, me behind me, it turns into marsh grass and salt pans and then spruce fir forest but in another gradient left and right, kind of transverse across that little peninsula or spit of land, we've got spruce and fir trees and then a little bit of spartina and then into the rock weed, some barnacles and water and of course, this is a lot of change in a very little period, very well, very small space, I should say. It takes a little longer and a little more effort walking up a mountain gradient to get the same levels of change but the idea is it's the soils or substrates in the previous photos, sand and mud and water. Some of that environment is always inundated. Some of that environment is inundated twice daily with the tides and so organisms living in terrestrial environment strictly, marine environment strictly and then in the intertidal zones back and forth kind of between the two and that's just a way of illustrating what happens in all types of gradients and here's another one and you have to invest a little more time walking in order to see it and experience it but at the lower elevations, this is Mount Abraham, both photos on the left are Mount Abraham. One is looking up at it from the Appalachian Trail, you can see a white blaze there. The other is an aerial photo looking from into the Parham Stream, Orbiton Stream Valley, where some of the projects ongoing or completed conservation projects, conservation easements have taken place. Some of this work I'm reporting today has been part of some small, hopefully more than small part of the ongoing and continuing efforts to conserve this landscape and past Abraham there's Sugarloaf and then the Bigelows and a whole pile of other mountains I could not name. It's kind of like when I go kayaking off the coast, I got my favorite islands. I know people are gonna say, what's that? What's that? And I steer them towards the ones I know. So anyway, over to the right here, these are series, the animals I cannot lay claim to but the vegetation photos are actually the walk, a walk of Mount Abraham. And starting down low elevation, following this physical biological gradient, see a representative warbler that often associated with damp areas, riparian areas, the Canada warbler, Atlantic salmon, decidedly not a fish, not even a flying fish, although they can leap up over riffles, but the salmon breeds up in this area and I wanted to cover the full taxonomic range, not just keep it to the birds and plants. Going up a little bit in elevation, little, and again, there are these patterns of elevation but layered on top of that, you've got varied soils and forest management histories. So it's not as strict a zonation as we saw on Southport Island in West Booth Bay, but a very general trend, moving up slope a little bit into some nice, I work in the Appalachian, Southern Appalachians too and I was about to say nice cove forest but it's sugar maple, beach, birch and there's a moose and of course, the moose could be found in most any of these photos but the black voted blue, that's about where you'd find him. Blackback woodpecker pine martin is a little mammal in the next photo, Canada Lynx, moving on up into the transition zone, a little more dramatic like the intertidal zone as you break out a tree line on a hike of Abraham, the black pole warbler and the big nails thrush and finally up top, not a bird but rather a picture of that cushiony plant called Diapensia arctic alpine indicator and we do have remnants of arctic alpine habitat in these mountains. And characteristic, I mentioned this earlier in the talk but characteristic of this gradient, two good representatives, black cap chickadee on the left and we see it's year round range includes a tiny spine down the Appalachians right onto the border of Tennessee, Georgia, North Carolina, up in those high Southern Blue Ridge Mountains and the Boreal chickadee over to the right and fully aware that there's an ongoing or maybe it has been settled. I think I've seen Nick's name in the paper about which chickadee ought to be the state bird and on our plate. But anyway, the Boreal chickadee to the right, resident at higher latitudes and higher elevation in Maine. I'm keeping an eye on time here and as I suggested at the beginning with that intro bio I was reminded that I've got to keep an eye on time but I can't help but take a break here to try out the Boreal chickadee song. So here we go. Okay, I will not subject you to the black cap and a lovely song, but I know you're probably more familiar with that but the, and I don't expect any of these birds to now be committed to memory by sight and sound but rather serve as a, I'm trying to do some comparisons and contrasts to help you learn, isn't that what they say about school and reading? You might not remember it, but you learn how to learn, at least that's what I hope. And so the Boreal chickadee, I think of it and you think, you know, use whatever tricks you need to use but it's more of a nasal, nasally and kind of emphatic chickadee, ding and ee and ee versus the clips, the cotto, chickadee, chickadee. And of course they are separated along the mountain range by elevational zone but these zones are not like Barnacle versus Spartina back at South Fort Island. They're pretty sloppy and I've been on walks where I've encountered the Boreal first and gone higher up and there's the black cap. So these relations are very general. More typically however, I do see them sorting out along elevation by the time you're up into trees that are just a little higher than you and you're probably just gonna be hearing the Boreal whereas it's the black cap that'll greet you when you pull up and park for the day's walk. Gradients, gradients everywhere. Another gradient that is layered into this walkup, Mount Abraham, is the gradient of forest age. Now forest age may be set back in time to a younger, shorter, smaller, non-woody, weed and grassy environment through natural disturbance or through timber harvest and then all the way on up through the shrub and the young forest community and mature forest community. This is a predictor too of where, of what birds you'll see. So at any given elevation you might especially lower down in the hardwood and mixed wood. You might look out and see a black-throated green warbler or a chestnut-sided warbler. And I'll keep it moving for the sake of time and not play those two characters. But here's a map on the right from this report I did for the main Appalachian Trailland Trust. And anything colored are those are the forest types, the greens, the yellows, the light greens, the dark greens, those are forest types by elevation. So it's not that everything in brown topographic lines doesn't have forest. It's just that we asked the GIS to just show us the forests less than 1500 feet. Again, thinking of gradients and then the soils and physical conditions associated with this walk up the mountain will be a very rough predictor of dominant vegetation types. And so it's hardwood, beech maple, yellow birch, balsam fir mixed in. Sometimes a landscape may be mixed because there's patches of soft and patches of hardwood. You might also call it a mixed forest because one tree is softwood, the next tree is hardwood. And living in a hardwood with a softwood component forest would be possibly the black-throated blue warbler and the black-throated green warbler. Now, the black-throated green warbler is often associated with a heavier softwood component. But that changes and that's a region, there are regional variations. My work up in New Brunswick, they were using almost exclusively pure hardwood stands in spite of ample mixed wood and softwood nearby. So great degree of plasticity in any of these relationships with vegetation, successional stage referring to the level of maturity after a disturbance or elevation. I want to say taken with a grain of salt because at a coarse level, these patterns are there but rather recognize the patterns are and can be kind of sloppy. Now, the black-throated green warbler and black-throated blue warbler in the same genus dendroica or dendroica. I think I have, no, let's see if I can, I'll skipping that for a minute, I may be wrong and I might have the wrong label there but moving right along, closely related and the black-throated green warbler is the one that goes zoosie, zoosie. We already played him and the black-throated blue warbler I'll give him a try, see here. Okay, that's a black-throated blue warbler. We're in a hardwood forest that about 1500 feet hardwood mixed wood and the black-throated green warbler right here. You heard him before but I'll play him again. Okay, no way that these will be committed to memory by the time we're done but the guide or the take home is here's where the mnemonic, the memory trick seems to really help, the phrase saying zoosie, zoosie or zoosie, zoosie is the buzzy black-throated green and the zoosie, that mnemonic is meant to capture the syllables and the accents is the black-throated blue warbler. And I've also included here their maps, thinking about the conservation and habitat they use both using the northeastern sub-boreal northern hardwood transitional forest and occurring breeding in the case of the black-throated blue. In the case of the black-throated blue, the summer breeding is in kind of a brick color and you can see it following the Appalachian spine down into the southern blue ridge, same with the black-throated green warbler. But as you can also imagine, conservation becomes, is very challenging and a more complicated story because these are neotropical migrants one of several dozens of species, two of several dozens of species wintering in the Caribbean and Central America and Northern South America. And there's often a fidelity or a linkage between a population of say, main black-throated green warblers, a winter in a different part of the Caribbean than a population of Michigan black-throated green warblers. So it's complicated teasing apart the source of declines and doing conservation internationally. Here again is those range maps as a boy looking in that crusty old field guide. 11 years old, I hadn't been to the Smokies yet. And but I imagined, I said to myself, well, that frying pan handle, use me. I call it the frying pan handle, the range of the burger going down into the Southern Appalachians. I figured that there must be something comparable to that part of the world, comparable to my part of the world growing up in New England and later settling in Maine. But as noted earlier, starting on Cape Cod, which by the way did not have black-throated blue warblers, nor black-throated greens, and by way of identifying and it could be coming familiar whether you're using an app or your field guide, the black-throated green or black-throated blue warbler, the white wing bar on the female is a good giveaway. Sometimes quickly on a bike ride out there at Southport Island where I bike in the evenings, a junko will flip across and I'll say, oh, is it black-throated? No, it's just a junko. So some of birding is learning the birds, whether it's songs or visuals that you may confuse with each other. And then picking up on that quick diagnostic that tells you it's not the other bird. Another part of the field guide, this is the anatomy of your resources. Again, whether it's your app or your field guide, there's a lot of information packed in here. It's tempting to flip through the book and say, oh, it's got that patch or it doesn't have that patch. That's important. Also noting here another point to bring forth, male and female variations, sexual dimorphism is the $10 term. Oftentimes the male in songbirds and other birds is a little more showy. Song is, of course, song and visual display are related to maintaining a territory. This song and display is with respect to other males that might want to include his polygon or piece of space to overlap with the other individuals. Also, it's to attract females. And some say it's the female is doing the sizing up of the territory and not really sizing up the male, but the male is procuring and maintaining a good territory. And all that advertising and showmanship is directed and performed with regard to the other males. And so it's an indirect effect on the female he procures this territory. Certainly it's probably a bit of both. I noted earlier the black-footed green using conifers here the habitat for the entry in this Peterson Field Guide that I took a photo of on my desk. Habitat mainly conifers. Well, I don't be afraid to see anomaly and variation or something different from what your Field Guide says. It's sometimes circular. If something says such as such an animal does not occur here, such and such an animal is not found in this tree. Well, if it's actually occurring there or in that tree, if you take the guide at its word, you'll never make a new discovery. So don't be afraid to learn, but also don't, please don't get the impression that these guides are wantonly wrong. But again, the theme here, I think one of them emerging is there's pattern. We try to organize the world, but there's some slop and some gradients. There's that word again. And again, the voice, a lisping dreamy. You know, I guess it's dreamy. Zoozy, zoozy, zoozy, or zee, zee, zee, zoozy. Those two songs incidentally are done in two different contexts. I will not get into them there, but follow up on that if you're on the edge of your seat because one is done more for made attraction in the presence of a female and one is done more for territorial delineation in the presence of another male. All right, I'll give it away. The one that is done for the other male with respect to is the one we think that is harder to pinpoint in space. So he's saying, I'm here, this is mine, but he's doing his best not to be found because a physical contest usually doesn't do anyone any good. So anyhow, mnemonic tricks, songs and calls, territory, made attraction, keeping in touch with the fledgings and contact on migration. Speaking of migration, I've been showing you some neotropical migrants, these birds wintering in the Caribbean, Central America, Northern South America, coming to North America to take advantage of the shopping carts full of insects, so to speak, for the brief time period, it seems brief these days that we have leaves here in Maine and then we have insects living on the leaves and then these insects are great sources of protein for building eggs and muscle and sinew in young nestlings and fledglings and for that matter, keeping the heart and soul of the adults alive too and of course a berry and vegetation crop for fattening up pre-migration before, oh, September, October, when we return to our 10 or 12 or 15 resident species, the hermitthrush is a partial migrant. You'd say the robin is a partial migrant too. I think the robins I'm probably seeing on my trees in my backyard in January are probably robins that may have shifted from Northern Maine or even further north into the Maritime provinces and my summer robins, so to speak, have made their way possibly toward Cape Cod, the hermitthrush you see here, breeding throughout New England, Western states, Western mountain states all across Canada and Adirondacks, New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia as well and wintering in the blue zone from mid-Atlantic down. And I remember when I worked at Manimett, we did our fieldwork in the summers based at a moosehead area and in the wintertime lived in a dormitory on Cape Cod Bay, Manimett being in the town of Plymouth. And we used to have, and sure enough, it's right in this map anyway, right at that edge, used to have a wintering hermitthrush hanging around us on Cape Cod Bay, but not singing. And still we're still in this hardwood zone, still in this hardwood mix zone at about 1,500 feet to 1,800 on Mount Abraham, yellow-bellied sap sucker, a migratory woodpecker versus the blackback downy, hairy and piliated. Here on the right, you can see it's wintering versus its summering range and the yellow-bellied sap sucker. I'll give him a try. Bear with me a sec, giving him a try with the song. So if that came through, the key point there is you've got woodpeckers, they peck. Well, they peck to make a nesting cavity, but you're probably not hearing them making their nesting cavity, because the nesting cavity is in a slightly softer tree, a little easier to excavate that cavity. What that drumming was, that tapping, that was, and that tapping, nor was that tapping foraging because they are also pecking in order to get a meal. But that pecking was communication, that was a drumming. And it's a tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And on a nice sounding board, I think there's probably some forethought or selection that goes into those trees that they advertise or use to advertise. Also in another couple of weeks, it's always amazed me how loud the young are, the sounds of the begging young in the nesting cavities of yellow-bellied sap suckers. The evolutionary biologist in me sometimes wonders, wow, how could it be a payoff to be that loud to predators? But maybe the payoff is that this species of parent really needs a reminder that we're hungry and we're right here, but I'm sure some of you have been aware or please track it down because it's one of the easier woodpecker nesting cavities to find because the young just sit in there announcing themselves. So we're still low down on the mountain, Downie and Harry Woodpecker. There are species-specific tapping and winning sounds I won't go into as I glance at my watch here, but the Downie and Harry are probably very familiar from your feeders, but they're also forest birds, kind of like the robin. The robin's a thrush that cosmopolitan does well a lot of places, but they're forest birds too. The robin, of course, using open patches, but I've seen them nesting like a woodland bird up in the Allagash. So the point here, I think one take home before I move on, people say, well, how do I tell them apart? And then someone might say, well, the Harry's bigger than the Downie. Well, that doesn't work all that well if they're not next to each other. And so here, look at the beaks, the beak of each bird, Harry on the right, in relation to the length of their head. When I say the length of their head, picking a line from the base of the beak to the back of the head, the Harry's is pretty close to the length of the head. And the Downie's is, oh, I don't know, half. So, and then you see them together, and one is obviously bigger, but it's not always so obvious if they're apart. So we moved up the Elevational Gradient, just a tad. This map taken from that report, I might've misspoken a little while ago, we were up to about 1,500 feet. Here we are at 15 to 2,500 feet. These are the forests that occur in that elevation zone. So you can almost see how from Phillips, Avon, and Strong, that's where the forests were lit up in the previous map at lower elevation. And now we've gone up the gradient, and what it shows us is that the towns of Rangeley and surrounding areas are at a higher elevation than Madrid and Phillips and Salem. And this is a photo taken from another 1,000 feet up the trail and softwood with some hardwood mixed in, fir, spruce, and birch. And one of the birds occurring here might be the Blackburnian Warbler. Now I'm not trying to say or imply that the Blackburnian only occurs above elevation X or Y or Z, but on this particular walk, on this particular gradient and forest composition, when softwood component starts coming in, the Blackburnian is keying off that softwood component, often singing from a nesting in a softwood tree with some hardwoods around it. Just to set the record straight, here by the shores of the Damascotta River in the Dodge Reserve, one of the, or the first parcel conserved by the Damascotta River Association in the early 70s, there are breeding Blackburnian Warblers, 20 feet off of sea level, but they're keying in on the softwood. And so this talk of a gradient and elevation, it's the softwood that is coming in because of the elevation on Mount Abraham that then might predict that we hear a Blackburnian Warbler. I'm gonna keep moving on, so we get through the walk, the tour, so to speak, and I'm not sure how the audio is working anyway. A couple more, permanent residents, not migrants, spruce grouse occurring at Northern latitudes or high up on the mountain. And the Blackback woodpecker, Doug, was on the lookout for the Blackback in his walk and recent talk here. I, what do I, I haven't seen too many in my life, have seen them, seen them, maybe seen and heard half a dozen dozen times on Big Moose Mountain in Moosehead Lake area. I think that's the name, yes, Big Moose Mountain. The ski area. And at lower elevations in softwood up around Lily Bay, so again, it's not strictly the elevation, it's not that, oh, I'm at 2,000 feet, now it's time for Blackbacks. It's more that on this particular walk and many walks in the mountains of Maine, there's a rough correlate between the elevation you find yourself at and the tree types, the softwood versus hardwood or mixedwood. And then in an added component, I talked a little bit about gradients of forest age and structure and type. After a burn or insect kill, you'll often find the Blackback woodpecker tapping away and flaking the bark away, big peels of bark, well, not peeled all at once, but the net result is big areas of exposed bark and very, very neat, tight, circular hole. It's almost like they have a compass. They pull out not a navigational compass, but a drafter's compass because it's a very, very neatly chiseled hole, the few I've seen. So these are two other birds that you might encounter, the spruce grouse. If you do encounter the spruce grouse, probably they're pretty tame or at least not in a rush to get away, but kind of in contrast to the rough grouse, which probably more likely seen and heard lower down the mountain in the hardwood. Finally, so the alpine, crumb holes alpine, I'm not depicting any birds here, well, I am in a moment, the black pole and the big nails thrush. Now, the big nails thrush and black pole are not on the diapensia cushion or using these rocks, but they are using the high elevation forest, subalpine forest, the upper right photo, upper left photo. These are where I broke out on above tree line on that report study I did a while back and documented the black pole and the big nails thrush there many surveys since throughout those mountains sketching out the population of the big nails thrush. And these two maps are showing two different elevational zones. The lower map is all forest and in the key you can see dark green is coniferous. We've gone into mostly coniferous by now. That's coniferous, not carnivorous, and then even higher up, greater than 3,500 feet, little patches of the arctic alpine and that's the diapensia plant, the flowering white plant in the lower right. But I gave it away, but here we are in the either high latitude or high up the mountain gradient into this vegetation zone. We've got the black pole orbler on the right and the big nails thrush on the left. I only have all kinds of lovely songs I'd like to play and compare the Viri to the big nails, to the Swainsons thrush, but I think I best hold off and just say that the, well I can't resist one story on the Rangeley Lake Heritage Trust, inaugural bird festival walk last year, one of them I was with several people who agreed to go on a little logging road drive later in the day after we walked the hardwood bottom lands in the mixed wood of Parham Stream. We took some logging roads up into a spruce fir zone cheated by internal combustion and to an area that I knew every year, reliably, black pole warblers and we got there and I'm listening and listening and listening and not hearing any. And then a couple of the people with me start saying, oh yeah, there they are. And then I was like, no, no, really? No, I know the black pole, I'd be hearing it. And the woman there, maybe she's out there in the audience today. She was hearing it just fine and I had at the age then of 54 finally crossed the threshold. All my mentors told me it would happen one day. I had lost the frequency of the black pole warbler and I was able to train my binoculars on the black pole, see it's beak moving, see it moving its head side to side and dead silent. So appreciate these high-frequency birds while you can and take people along with you who are younger. And so finally, I'm gonna wrap up here with a little bit of the conservation context. From the Wilderness Society, I work a lot with diverse partners and get behind and help write working forest easements that include timber management, motorized in all manner of recreation. We try to find areas where there are ecological reserves set aside that are not managed for timber but there are large areas that are and I'm glad they are managed for wood products. We try to write easements that do it in a way that maintains forest structure, age and composition. Sometimes we hit the mark, sometimes we don't but the landscape has a lot of demands, a lot of interests, a lot of people who intersect on a lot more than is commonly first assumed. And so whether you're hunting or driving something that takes petrol or propelling yourself, whether you're birdwatching or hunting, I don't know what the overlap is, but it's a pretty big overlap. The overlap being the value is the interest. We all want forest or many of the people I speak of. This is a picture of the backdrop picture is Reddington Mountain. The boat a 10,000 acre easement that I helped write along with Simon Rucker and Trust Republic land and the Navy asked me another time how the Navy became involved, but it's an easement with public access and ecological reserve now held by Northeast Wilderness Trust and Working Forest held by the owner who lives across the country. Who lives across the Atlantic somewhere. Conservation, some of the finer scale things we're worried about, there's landscape level. My own work with the black-foded green warbler, I was looking at their tree species selection and use and the arthropods yielded by particular tree species and they're foraging efficiency in particular tree species. And so it's pretty easy to imagine that the beach is selected well out of proportion to its abundance, the American beach is AMBE in the lower left graph or plot. If a landowner or a manager doesn't like beach because it doesn't make good income, then when you're writing an easement, you wanna be pretty careful that you provide for the diversity of tree species because it turns out the American beach is pretty important and we linked it to actual reproductive success of black-foded green and black-foded blue warbler populations. The woodthrush going back to work way back for me in the late 80s, we're looking at interior habitat versus fragmented habitat and their reproductive success and these are concerns and considerations for landscape planning. And finally, some of my work, I wanted to put it in a bigger context is we're looking at the Appalachian Trail which is protected to at least 1,000 feet goes to many national parks and national forests and in Maine, it goes to a lot of private landscape. Where the Appalachian Trail is a good start on what may very well be an important climate adaptation corridor or a series of reserves in the context of climate change. And even without climate change, long before climate change was a concern from a conservation point of view, we were worried about fragmentation and habitat reduction overall. So the Appalachian Trail is a 200,000 acre, 2,000 mile national park. And so I spent a bit of my time working in the Southern Appalachians and the Northern Appalachians. Here's a map of some of these landscape considerations. The high peaks is in there in the lower left of the state of Maine and these maroon blobs are unroaded big contiguous blocks. And I'm gonna stop there because there is not an ounce of time left to have some fun comparing. Peter, that was fantastic. Thank you. We are pushing time and I want to, first of all, thank you so much for that great presentation. And then I wanna make sure we can get a few questions in. And I also wanna ask you if you could unshare your screen so I can try to set up for the next virtual loon cruise starting in just a minute. Yeah, sorry about going over. No problem at all. So first question from Nancy. Quickly, Peter, can you tell us about songbirds, including the red-bellied woodpecker that are dramatically changing their territories as the climate warms? Oh yeah, that's a really cool question, Mike. So my folks, we live nearby in Bristol, Maine and they were seeing this woodpecker that they'd never seen before. It was a red-bellied and as a boy on Cape Cod, it was a novelty to have it on Cape Cod. And with changing climate, we believe, and I think the evidence is pretty strong that it is expanding its range northward. The Cardinal is another one. Amy Meehan I worked with and John Hagen worked with them on the Manomet Project in the early 90s, late 80s. And she was from wind to Maine and it was a big deal for her to see Cardinals and wind to Maine growing up as a girl and as a child. And now they're all over the mid-coast and so the red-bellied too. Our local paper, the Lincoln County News, local broadsheet here in the Bristol Peninsula, Pamukwyd, had an article about an explosion this year. That's kind of a dramatic term, but a lot of red bellies in the area. So yes, a quick version is we are seeing a range expansion. It is most likely, more than likely, climate change related. And so it's an example of the need to maintain these stepping stones of habitat, roughly along the north-south quarter. Great, thank you. I will ask one more question. I know we're pushing time, but have you seen Big Nails at a lower elevation during the breeding season? I believe I heard one and this is from Sea Parish. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Thank you. That, this backing up a sec, I have. And that's why I was thinking of that very topic when I was saying, look, I'm talking about elevation and habitat type, but it's sometimes it's really the habitat type that's often associated with elevation. Great example, up in New Brunswick, when I was doing some of my graduate work, I was in the same camp as a woman working on Big Nails thrush that were breeding in low elevation, much lower elevation, not even on a mountain, early regenerating areas after harvests on, turn out it was Irving property. So yes, in a quickly, yes, lower elevation, but keying in on the vegetation structure. Great, Peter, thank you so much for joining. That was a fantastic presentation, very informative. And we, and thank you very much.