 Hey folks, it's November in Maine, which means it's rarity season for any avid bird watchers. As fall migration wraps up, this tends to be when we see vagrants or birds that are rare to Maine or the Northeast begin to show up here. And two rarities that are getting a lot of attention right now are barnacle goose that showed up in Rockland and an ash-thirted flycatcher down in Biddeford. We've been getting a lot of questions about them at Maine Audubon, so I want to make this quick video to explain kind of who they are, maybe why they showed up here and how you can go be able to see them. And before we start, let me just say that birds have wings and they do use them, so it's always good to make sure that these birds are still being seen before you travel any distance to try and find them yourself. So why don't we start by looking at some place that you can actually go to figure out if these birds are still being seen or not. So on ebird.org you can click on the explore tab down to where it says alerts, type in Maine and Viva. Now you can see this nice list of all the rare birds that are being reported, lots of reports of our barnacle goose. You can also see our ash-thirted flycatcher reports here. Let's start with the barnacle goose and we can use ebird to help illustrate some of the points here. Looking at the species page, we can actually see how it's noted right in here that they breed in lean Greenland, some areas north of Europe. If we click to look at their map, we can see where they've spent the summer going to breed. Then as they transition into the fall migration, some of these barnacle geese that are breeding up in Greenland, rather than migrating east down to parts in Europe, they'll actually join in with some flocks of Canada geese and continue all the way south into where we see them here. Using this, we can zoom right into Rockland and on the map now see where these individual pins are are all sightings of this barnacle goose that's being seen in Rockland right now. It was first found on November 5th by local birder Don Riemer. Folks in the mid-coast area, and certainly beyond, will know Don from his regular column on birding in the free press, and I also want to give a shout out to his new book, Seen Anything Good. Don also famously found a pair of pink-footed geese, another European species, at this exact same location back in 2017. You can see on the map that the barnacle goose has mostly been seen around this football field that's just south of South Elementary School, right along Thomaston Street, but it does move around a little bit. When it's not being seen at the school, it's often a little further south along Route 73 towards the turn off to Owl's Head, and apparently it also spends time roosting just in the cove and bay a little north of here. That's where it's spending the evenings before then goes out to the fields to feed during the day. The idea is pretty straightforward, barnacle geese being slightly smaller than our common canadas, but the black front and white undersides are easy to pick out in the flock. The bird has beautiful patterning on its wings with dark tips on its secondaries that also show on each step up of the coverts as you go, creating this contrasting bars up the back, and of course the extensive white face and surprisingly small bill for a goose. If this bird lingers much longer, it may help to look at where the pink-footed geese that were in the area also hung around. You can see them by the school, same thing going into the harbor, but they also extended their range north, and we're often seen around the golf course and some areas kind of around the upper part of this bay. So the longer this bird sticks around, it's pretty likely the more area that it's going to cover. Now let's jump south to Bitterford Pool for the Ash-Thorded Flycatcher, which was first found on November 7th by out-of-state birders Tosh, Scotland, and Alan Niddle. This is definitely a trickier idea, as it is with most flycatchers, but it helps that this is from the more distinctive genre of flycatchers called the large myarchus flycatchers. Typically in Maine, we only expect great crested flycatcher as the only myarchus that regularly occurs east of Mississippi, but great crested are larger with brighter yellow extending up across the chest. The Ash-Thorded Flycatcher lives up to its name with that gray throat and also shows rufous edged primaries contrasting with the yellow edged secondaries. The flycatcher was found and continues to be seen in an area of Bitterford Pool that is unfortunately on private property. However, thanks to advice from Bob Sewell, the superintendent at the Abenaki Golf Club, we were given the advice that birders could park along Leicester B Orca Road and then walk down St. Martin's Lane to get to the church where the flycatcher has been seen. The bird has been staying on the slope behind the cemetery and comes into the first yard and even up to the edge of the road to forage. There are two stone pillars at the end of the cemetery and birders are being asked not to go beyond those. Also be aware that there are multiple construction projects going on at the end of St. Martin's Lane so please do not get in the way of any workers. It is fun to put a little context to these records. So here's a map to show all the previous records of Ash-Thorded Flycatchers in Maine. They are mostly all along the coast and all except for one being in October or later and this Bitterford bird now fits nicely into this established pattern. All on this map let's also look at past barnacle goose records. The majority of them come from agricultural fields in Rooster County mostly in the first half of October. This Rockland bird represents the first record for Knox County and is the first in the southern half of Maine in almost a decade making it an easier target for a lot of birders. I hope this helps anyone wanting to learn more about these birds and best to block to anyone going out to try and see them.