 I've got it. I can't find the record button. Yeah. I got it. It's done. It's being recorded now. Yes. Possibly. Also, Bill, can you tell Nick that I will take some notes from the chat. If I get, if I think, if I remember. I'll try. Sorry, I can't hear you. I said, I'll take some notes from the chat. If I remember. Terrible at looking at the chat. As far as questions go, so. Yeah, we'll figure out the questions. We'll figure out the questions when we get there. Yeah, you can just take questions from the room too. You can just take questions from the room. Yeah, we could, we could do that. Okay. Anyway, out of here. Yeah. It was good. Sorry with the screen share because I got it. Keep it going. Monica, does your screen indicate that the recording is on? Yes, it does. Okay. Thank you. So we're, we're not quite ready to start, but this program is being presented two ways, one in person to you. And also by a zoom to about a hundred other people. Wherever they may be. So we're doing this dual technology with being very, we're not being risk averse where we're diving in. Yeah, what he's saying is you could have laid in bed. But it's not, it's not thinking about that. So we're going to allow a few minutes. We just opened up started the zoom online. So we're allowing a couple of minutes for people to log in. And then we'll go. Bill. Yes. If I could, it's always, it would be good if you stayed in the picture when you're talking like that. You got it. It's a little confusing for the zoomers. It's like the voice of your conscience coming out. So you don't know quite where it's coming from, but. Okay. Well, I will start with the. Introduction. I have several things to mention. So I'll just run through them kind of quickly. And then we'll get on to the regular program. First of all, delighted to have you all here tonight as well as people. At home on zoom. We have a lot of people here. For people here we are having a book sale of mostly bird books. That were in the library of our. A long time, but now departed. Dear board member Pat Moynihan. So the books are available. Excuse me for any donation. You would like to make. A donation. Thank you for the program. In terms of upcoming events. First. Every year, your county Audubon. And Wells reserve do a seed sale. A bird seed. And it happens this time of year. We share the proceeds jointly. So it benefits our two worthy organizations. And also benefiting these two great organizations. There's in our newsletter and on the table, there's an order form. The ordered deadline for the early bird discount. It's Friday, October 28th. So you could keep that in mind. And then bird seed is picked up. November 4th and 5th here. So if that's of interest to you, please check it out. And if you have any information on that is also available. Both on the York County website, as well as the Wells reserve website. Number two. We have a. Wonderful desk calendar. That a former board member of ours, Marie Jordan has produced every year. Each month, a different photograph of a main bird that was taken within the last year. So we have a lot of information on that. These are wonderful items. They sell for $10. Plus shipping. Information on that is again available in our newsletter. And also on our website. So feel free to check that out. We greatly appreciate any. Essentially donations that. We receive in that manner. Okay. Number three. We'll be zoom only. It'll be on our regular slot of the third Tuesday when we usually do them. It's Tuesday, November 15th. At seven o'clock. It'll be a zoom program on bird migration. Being presented by a gentleman named Scott Widen, Saul, who some of you may know. He's a world famous ornithologist. He has. Over 30. Mostly bird related books, including New York Times best sellers. He's a great. Bird or a great presenter. So we encourage you to check that out as well. It'll be zoom only not in person because he is not in Maine. So that's one of the benefits of zoom is we can get presenters from far afield. And then tonight we have a presenter who is not from as far afield. We're very pleased with that fact. Nick Lund is. A native manor who. Strayed for a bit, but then not that I want to talk because I'm not a native myself, but he has returned to Maine. He now works for Maine Audubon for a number of years. He's well known to. Many people through his blog, the birdist. That combines birding with humor. Which I recommend. And he's also the publisher, excuse me, the author of a number of books now, including. Right here. The new American birding association field guide to the birds of Maine, which is a great resource. And maybe Nick can say a couple of words about it. So without further ado. Hey. Hello. How's it going everyone. I'm Nick. Thanks for coming out in person. Look at this. Like the good old days. And hello, people online. That might be too dark. For the online. Nope. Monica voice of God. Is that too dark? It's a little dark, but we'll live because we can see. Okay. I could do with it with a little dimming too. Just looking at myself in this. It's totally fine. What's up? How's it going? Let's get started. All the best birds of Maine is what I've called. This program and. It's gonna work when I press this button. Whoops. Oh no, how do we do this? Laurie, we did it. I'm going to go now. It's not changing. Yeah. Hold on. It's working on my computer, but not sharing the right way. Ready. It's going to work. When we do that. What's up. Look at that. Well done. Yeah, I put this program together to about the release of my book. I got a fancy author photo in front of some lobster traps. And I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I almost wore that same shirt tonight. And that would have been really embarrassing. Thank goodness. I did. It's called the American bird association field guide to the birds of Maine. It's a Maine specific guide to. 260 something of the birds you can find in Maine. It's, it's beautiful. It came out earlier in May or so. And that was really fun to do. Whoops. And that's going the wrong. I'm doing this directly. Keeps. There might be another button. Okay. This might be a thing that we're going to have to deal with. And that's okay. Just about me. I've written a couple of other things. I also released in May is a kid's biography of the earth. That I wrote for middle grade kids. Very fun. Illustrated guide. I write online as the birdist. That's my weird little logo thing in the middle there. And I was on a map and, but I've I write for slate and. Portland Phoenix and national and Bon and others. I do weird stuff too. With birds. Like some of us birders know, we sort of can't get enough of it. I was sitting at a desk for a long time and I started scrolling around. Google street view. You know, trying to find birds in the background. I started a whole Facebook group of people trying to search for, for birds. We have over 6,000 members. We've found over 1,200 bird species on Google Street. Do you believe that? It's maybe the weirdest thing I do, but we do it. What I really love to do is go birding and talk about birds. And that's what we're going to do today. This program, All the Best Birds of Maine, this is just celebrating bird life of Maine. It's great. And I will say I have modified this a little bit for you all tonight. This is a program I originally gave for people that I didn't think knew anything about birds. So it was a little general. I get a little specific in here just for you all because I appreciate you coming out. Let's get started. God, do I like Maine? I have a tattoo of Maine. I am a native manor. It's okay to stray. It's okay to not be a native manor. We're all here right now. That's the point. It's a great place to live. It's a great place to look for birds. From the perspective of a bird, I would say Maine has about three distinct regions. This is very general. Not super scientific. But when you are looking at Maine through the eyes of a bird, you look at three things. Start with the coast. We got a ton of coastline, right? Famous rocky coast. That attracts tons of birds. We have birds that nest on our rocky islands, right? So we have these seabirds that spend their entire life out to sea. They need to lay eggs. They can't lay eggs on water yet. So they got to figure out a place to do that. Where they go is these rocky islands off the coast of Maine. There's no predators. There's some tusks in places that they can hide themselves out. Whether it's sort of Appledore and the Isle of Shoals off the southern coast, all the way up to Machado Sea Line and places like that, we have famous seabird breeding islands here in Maine. That coastline with the beaches and with shorebirds and those rocky islands are sort of famous for Maine birds. The second area is, I would say, just southern Maine, I could say, you know, from about Bangor down, very generally excluding mountains. That's what I'd call eastern forests. So in Maine, we're sort of the northern extent of the eastern forest that otherwise goes down to like Virginia places like that. So we have some species here that sort of top out, right? And so if you're a birder in Maine, you see all those species in southern Maine. You can't see them anywhere else. The rest of it, northern Maine, the mountains in northern Maine, very special part of the country. Those sort of deep dark classic Maine forest, boreal forests, sort of the area between the tundra and eastern forests. And there's a ton of birds that live just there. There's not a lot of boreal habitat in the rest of the country, especially east of the Mississippi. And so when you, when birders come to Maine, they're looking for a lot of those special birds. So those are just a quick overview. And the way I am breaking up this presentation is we're going to do a few top five lists. When I put this together originally, I did one of these like internet mash-ups with my face and David Letterman's face crossing the one. And I couldn't sleep for like three nights just looking at it. So I would just pretend that we are on David Letterman. There you go. We're going to start here. The five most commonly seen birds in Maine. Before I go, any guesses? Okay. Anything else? Row? Good. Gulls? Blue jays? I love them. Let me start here. This bad boy. Everybody know what this is? Some birders in the room. This is a sparrow. We had to start here with the hard ones, huh? Sparrows are a group of like 20 plus little brown birds. They're all look sort of like this. Some combination of brown and gray and spotted. And figuring out which one is which is, it's part of the fun of a lifetime of birding, sorting through all these guys. This is, you know, they're like this, a lot of sparrows feed on the ground, right? If you're on the ground, it's a little dangerous for predators, right? And so a lot of them are very camouflaged so they can hide out and try to protect themselves. This is one of the most common we have and probably the most, the one you find most often around human habitation. I bet all, I bet if we went out in the bushes, it was daytime, we could see some of these. I bet in your yards, your side yards, you have some of these bounce around. This is what we call a song sparrow. Song sparrow. The ID things here to remember is number one, you can see that that, getting all the streaks on the breast, they got, you can not see it perfectly, but there's a little spot right in the middle. See that? Significant of a, for a song sparrow. The other things I always look for is you, coming down from the bill, he's got those sort of like mutton chops down there. That'll sort of fume and chew. It's called technically a submustational stripe. That really strong submustational, the dark one with the lighter cream color on above it, that helps me indicate that it's a song sparrow. But really the best way and the way I think this is one of the most common birds is because they sing all the time. It's a song sparrow. And so this may not work for the folks online and I apologize, but I'm going to play the song of the song sparrow to see if you recognize it. Anybody remember this? This is like the sound of spring right now. You know, again, if sparrows weren't hard enough, remembering bird songs is even more impossible, but there is a little breakdown you can do to try to remember this. The one way to remember it starts slow with a couple slow drawn out notes and then it just sort of falls off the map with a bunch of jumbles of different sounds. So listen for the slow and then the fast and then it's a mess every time. Okay, so that's a song sparrow. It's a song sparrow number four and I'm going to see if I can do this really quick. Nope, I'm just going to go. Oh no. It's going to go blind. Yes, somebody called it out. Right? No, no, again. Chickadee, yeah. Why? I don't know why. Hey, look at that. Not a chickadee. We got some real pros out here. Not a chickadee. A go, but what go? Oh, come on. This is too basic for you guys. It's a herring go. We have three very common gull species in Maine, but they all look a little different. Starting in the left over there, birders are not the most creative bunch. That little small gull with the ring around its bill is a ring-billed gull. Got it? Very common. This is, and I'm not trying to denigrate anything. Anybody can get food from wherever they want. This is the bird you'd most commonly see at like a dumpster, right? Like a Walmart parking lot, but not just there, right? You see them all over the place. At the beach, more common than any other species found inland, right? Some actually breed in far northern Maine. You find them at cruise and over lakes and stuff. Ring-billed gull. Over closest to me, the big black-backed gull is of course the great black-backed gull. The largest gull in the world, believe it or not. Largest in the world. Most rarely seen away from the immediate coast. This is the one you see like perched on piers and pylons and masts and things on boats. Easy to identify because it's huge. It's like so big that you're like, I don't want to go over there like that. I'm like nervous. And very dark colored gray on the back. Great black-backed gull. Pink legs on that bad boy. In the middle, we get a little more complicated with names. Not named after what it looks like, but what it eats. It's a herring gull. It eats other stuff too. It eats tons of stuff. Like all gulls, very, very diet. Eats a lot of stuff at the landfill. If you go to a landfill, always traditionally the best place to see gulls. But herring gull is probably the most numerous, most commonly, it's seen inland. It's seen at the coast. And is our fourth most common bird. American goldfinch. A stunner. A real beauty. One of the most common birds in Maine. But a lot of people have misconceptions about that. At Audubon, I work at Maine Audubon, every fall we get people calling in saying, where are my goldfinches? They've all gone. And what are these weird brown birds that are now on my fingers? Goldfinch don't migrate. They may move around a little bit, but they don't make big seasonal shifts like other species do. They just change their plumage. The way I explain it to people on the phone, which they don't really want to, is in the spring, springtime is when birds come to mate. They've got one thing in mind, they have to find a mate, lay some eggs, and have babies. To do that, they have to impress a mate. And so they put on their finest clothes, and they sing their finest songs. It's like when we go to the prom. You're trying to look your best. You comb your hair and stuff. And that's how they impress the mates. But those of us who are married, no, once you're married, you're not combing your hair. I'm not putting on a fancy dress anymore. So after the breeding season is over, once the job is done of trying to attract a mate, they're like, I'm out. I'm out of this fancy shiny yellow clothes. And they molt into the sweatpants, basically, because they wear those wet pants. And so it makes sense if you think about it. It actually takes more energy to grow these brighter feathers. They're more visible to predators when they're like this. So in the fall, when they don't need to impress anybody, they're like, I'm just going to go in chill mode and ride it out. So the birds that you see at your feeders, the goldfinches that you see at your feeders are probably the same exact ones all year round. They just look really different. I mentioned calls a minute ago. And there's a very important one for goldfinches, because goldfinches are one of the few birds, if I spell it right, that call constantly while they are flying. And if you can learn to recognize their flight call, you can really get an understanding of how many goldfinches there are all over the place. There's tons of them. And I'll give you a little trip. This is even better than the sort of slow tumble of the song. The goldfinch when it flies, it sounds like it's saying potato chip. All right. You're just going to have to bear with me. It's going to say potato chip, potato chip. All right. Here's what it sounds like. Right. I got some furrowed bras out there. Potato chip, potato chip. Trust me, it works. Furters, these all these things all sound the same. How are you supposed to remember them all? It's crazy. You got to do what you can. Potato chip. That little three-note do-do-do-do thing. They give it while they are in flight and you'll be hearing it on your way into the bank or whatever. They're flying over constant. Okay. So just bear with me on that. Goldfinch number three, number two. And I was hoping to get into my notes because there's some notes out on read. Black capped chickadee, the best. Main state bird. Does anybody remember the little hubbub a couple years ago about main state bird? I started that. That was my hubbub. I got nothing against Black capped chickadee. I love them. But I started it. I came, I returned home. I had my, I had our son. You wanted to move from Washington, D.C. to back home to Maine. We did it. Got a job made out of awesome. You know that first week when you're just sort of doing paperwork and there's not much going on yet? I was in that thing and just sort of sit on my desk. And I decided to look up the main state law, creating the chickadee as the state bird. What does the law say? And the law, all it says, the entirety of the law is the state bird shall be the chickadee. That's it. That's it. And I said to myself, oh, that's weird because we have two species of chickadee in Maine. We have the Black capped chickadee and we have in the woods of Northern Maine the boreal chickadee, a completely different species. And so I sort of filed that away. I thought that was interesting. About a week later, I was on a main, one of Maine Audubon's boat trips and I was trying to make small talk with a reporter. A boat is a tough place to make small talk. You've got nowhere to go. So I was racking my brain and I said to Deirdre Fleming of the Press Herald, I said, did you know that Maine doesn't really have a state bird? And she said, what? And I said, oh no, what have I done? And then about a week later, I'm on the front page of the Press Herald saying, Maine Audubon says there's no state bird. And the way that went is some, a representative in Skauhegan read that article and introduced a bill to clarify the situation. So I get hauled up in Augusta. This is not in my job description. I'm not supposed to do this. This is not Maine Audubon's policy priority. But I get hauled up to testify in this bill about whether what the state bird should be. And the committee said, we're not two cares. We have more important things to do. They killed the bill. And that was that. But technically Maine doesn't have a state bird, okay? Don't tell anyone. The Maine state bird was created in 1829, 1927. Part of a wave of state birds across the country to try to raise awareness. State birds were created to raise awareness about bird deaths. So it's a, it's a good, you know, it's not in the Constitution, but there was this wave from an activist in Florida to create state birds. And we picked the Black Heptchickity. So did Massachusetts and they, which is too bad. We had it first. Anyway, chickadee, it's a great bird. Why are chickadees great? Black Heptchickity, you could find it from, from Kittery to Fort Kent in the middle of the woods in cities or everywhere. I love them in particular because they are, they live in social groups. They're bounced around the forest together and they know their territory really well. They know it like the back of their wings. And they know it so well that migratory birds who don't know the territory know to fall in with lots of chickadees when they're moving because they're like, we don't know where the food is. Well, let's go with this group. And so if you are out birding, especially this time of year, or in fall, in fall migration, especially, and you sit and you hear some chickadees wait or try to get them in because they'll probably be a bunch of other birds trailing along with them. Just one of the, one of the great things about chickadees. Numero uno! Somebody did say it. Yes. Crow. Crow. We, this is the American crow. One of three crow species in Maine. Did you know that, believe it or not? I'll start with one, the fish crow. Fish crow is basically a summer only resident. Looks identical to an American crow. And a real test, if you're, if you're talking to a birder, they sound different and sounds is, sound is the way really the only reliable way to distinguish them. And if you're talking to a birder who's like, oh, see that? That's a fish crow. Without hearing it, walk away from that bird because they are, they're full of it and you don't want to get. Fish crows are primarily a southern species. They creep up and are probably most common right around here, your county and places down here. They, like I said, they look identical. They're slightly smaller. They have a different call and I'll play it for you. The, sorry, hold on. Fish, there we go. So the, we all know the crow. Ca, like that. I'll play it in a second, much better than the fish crow doesn't do that. The fish crow has a little two note call that to me sounds like a kid saying, saying no to broccoli. Okay. So if you're out and you hear that, a kid's either trying to get some broccoli or there's a fish crow around. All right. And now this, now my phone screwed up. Hold on. Everything's going haywire. That's the fish crow. They leave in the winter most of the time. And so most all of the crows that we have, especially, well, that look like that are American crows. The other big crow is a common rate, right? Oh, what a bird. That is the best. Bigger, wilder, I would say than American crows. Just an impressive bird. They are ones, you know, I spent a lot of time up in northern Maine, especially in the fall and winter when there's not much around. And they will, you'll hear them cawing and it's like a, it's like spiritual and terrifying at the same time. I love Ravens. Here's some of the noises they make. Deep thunderous. Bigger than American crows. The biggest difference is their tail pattern. Ravens have a big sort of diamond shaped club tail, whereas crows have basically sort of a flat short tail eaten scene when flying. You can be hard to tell apart. It's, you know, if they're just sitting on the ground and it's only one, so don't beat yourself up. They're all black. Don't worry about it. All right. Those are the five most commonly seen birds in Maine. Okay. Here's where we start getting into some special stuff down here. Yeah. This idea is just for you all. And do we have till eight? Is that right, Bill? Is that, it's still something? Okay. Check them in time. I'm going slow. Five species more common in York County. Here we are in York County. And I just sort of was wanting to figure out what are some species that if you're a bird in Maine, you want to come down to York County to find. Here it is, York County, from Old Orchard Beach up into the mountains. I don't know much about birding up in Northern York County, but primarily famous in the South. You've got a lot of birds down here. This is a Ebert hotspot map. You can see down there, that's Isla Shoals at the bottom. And the coast is where most birders around here focus. You've got some great beaches. You've got some great marshes. Got a lot of great stuff going on. What are five birds that are most common down here? Yes, maybe. What is this? So I can't see my notes. And I just did this today. So this is what I intended as a mystery. And I don't remember what it is. Here it is. Here's the map. Screech owls. Screech owls, extremely rare in Maine overall. Even historically, they were sort of known as the rarest overall. There are spotted records from the 19th century, early 20th century around York County, Oxford up to Franklin, up to Washington even. And they're really sort of, I could just creep in back, I would say. They are becoming sort of more commonly seen in the past couple of years. I've never seen one in Maine. But I know that a lot of my friends, the first one they ever saw was like in Kittery or in near a different pool down there. What a bird. This is right. Oh my goodness. They come in a couple of flavors, red, gray. We get each, I think it's, I don't really know actually why, but I think it's even Stevens in terms of their breakdown. But what a great bird. If you are all out, the way most people hear them, or recognize that there's a screech owl around, is that you hear it? Do you want to hear it so we can be prepared? All right. It's got a sort of a horse whinny, and then a trill. The trill is a real thing. Here we go. Spooky. There we go. God, I had a friend who used to be able to mimic that trill really well, and he would do it to me like without me knowing. And one time I was in this, she's laughing at me. Eastern screech owl. Yeah. King rail. You got some great marshes down here. You got some great marshes. And Richard Carson asked, Wildlife Refuge is world famous for the habitat it protects. And for a couple years, there was a king rail that was in those marshes. I again didn't see it. That's maybe a theme of some of these, is that I didn't see. Typically, a southern species, rails are cool birds, odd birds. They are extremely secretive. They are super thin, and they live their lives skittering among reeds. They don't like to be seen by anybody. That term thin is a rail. It comes from these birds. That's where that comes from. Because they're so skinny, they squeeze between the little reeds, and you wouldn't see it. That leads to sort of their mystique a little bit, because they're just so hard to see. So you could walk by them all the time, but you wouldn't see it. This one or more than one was around for, what, 16 to 2016, 2018? I'd say is that right? Looking at Bill. And a very cool bird. One that was really only ever in York County. This is the typical range of the king rail. See it sort of peaks its way up there, but not quite. And again, I'm flying blind on the slides right now. I couldn't do sort of York County's specialty birds without getting into Stanford Lagoon, where everyone would call it. What a remarkable place. I love being a bird for a million reasons. One is because you just go to places that other people don't go. Some people want to go to Disneyland. I want to go to a waste treatment facility in Sanford. But that's where the birds are. If you think about it, a waste treatment plant is incredible habitat. It's giant ponds with no people around, no boat disturbance, anything like that, a bunch of vegetation and being left alone. And Sanford Lagoon is famous all across the state for the birds that turn out there. It's incredible habitat. You can see 2,300 checklists down there. A couple of the specialties I've seen, both of these here. It's probably the best place in the state to see both of these birds, Ruddy Duck and Common Galanul over there, which has bred a couple of times in the state, but most common at Sanford. All right, now this guy. The specialty of York County is a bird called an Appledore gull. Anybody heard of this one? No? Yeah. Well, so Isla Scholes are the group of islands that is on the New Hampshire main border down south of us. And being a rocky coastal island, it gets its fair share of seabirds that breed out there. It's famous, including gulls. And in the 2000s, it was the first known area of hybridization ever between a herring gull and a lesser blackbacked gull. Famous gull nerds, and they are nerds, trust me. People who really love gulls were beside themselves with this. The offspring of this bird, these birds kept coming and reproducing for several years, were called Appledore gulls. And they were being banded by the folks on the island and sited all up and down the east coast of the United States. So you could find them everywhere and track their progress. Lesser blackback gulls don't breed. So this is lesser blackback gull breeding range. That's the orange, right? The blue is their wintering range. They sort of spread out far and wide. They're always less common than other gulls. It's always sort of exciting when you see them. They look like, remember the great blackback gull I showed before, a smaller version of that. They're as small as a ring-billed gull, but they have that dark blackback and most of the time they have yellow legs, which is a good tip off. And you can see they winter here, they winter along the coast. I saw one the other day in Maine, but they don't breed here except this one. You know how love is, you know? I don't know. I don't know. He was here in the winter and said, I'm just going to hang out with this sweetheart, so I don't have a better picture. But Appledore gull sent shockwaves through the birding world and is, I guess, the only endemic York County species that there is. Not bad. It's not a species. It's a hybrid, but you know what I'm talking about. All right. Oh, there it is. That's it. On the one over there. As if gulls weren't hard enough. Now you have hybrid gulls. So, you know, this is a herring gull here. You can see how light gray its back is. You see how that, which is the hybrid offspring of the lesser blackback and the herring gull, slightly darker. Gull people are maniacs. Again, if you meet a gull person, also walk the other way. They go to landfills in the winter and just look at the, and they get so excited about the difference of shade and gray. Stay away from them. All right. Oh, but we're going to get even more low. Yeah, baby. This place where we are right now is an incredible bird hotspot. It's amazing down here. And I get into it a little bit later, but vagrants, rare birds, gets birders' hearts pumping. There's basically, there's two kinds of rare birds. There are birds that are just, there are fewer of them, or they're harder to find. So like owls, right? There are owls around. They live here. They're supposed to be here, but because of their habits, you don't see them that much. So that's a rare bird, right? Cool. The other rare bird is the kind that doesn't live here, that shows up here. And that's one of the joys of birding, because birds do that. They can just fly. You know, zebras don't just like swim across and use a zebra, but birds can just do whatever they want, right? And they do. And it's so exciting when you find a bird that's out of place. And lotto has a ton of those. And so I picked some of the, I just did this not scientifically, but five of the best birds that have been seen in this spot. 200 of the 267 reported here. It's actually more than that because there's a bunch of different hotspots for the far and here, but this is a hotspot. This is a really great place to bird. You've got the fields, you've got the beach, you've got the woods. This is a real attractant. Okay, yeah. 2018 hooded warbler, female hooded warbler, does not breed in Maine, not a bird that lives in Maine. But occasionally this was in May, so this is what we might call the reason for this bird to be a big one is that overshot, right? It was migrating, maybe it caught a tail in, maybe it was just feeling it. Maybe it was just like, I got Andy Jr. to burn, I'm cruising. This hooded warbler, hooded warblers, don't breed too far away, you can find him in western mass breeding. But I've never seen this bird in Maine, very rare up here. And the males in their breeding clumpage have a big sort of black hood that goes around their yellow face. This individual is a little different, but this is a, this is a sought after bird, a good one for a lot of congratulations. Oh man, this one hurts. This one really hurts. This is a bird that I chased. So the pleasure or the pain in the butt of vagrants is that, so what's exciting about it is you never know when they're going to show up and you never know where they're going to show up and they don't care if you have to pick up your kid or you have a meeting or you have work, right? You're sitting at your desk and all of a sudden it's like Connecticut warbler at Laudheim Farm. We got to go. You got to do it. And so you say, sorry, family and obligations. Or you don't and then you rule not going and build up resentment inside forever. Just kidding. But that's one of the fun, the spontaneity of birding and rare birds and chasing birds is so much fun to me because there's no other hobby like that. You know, it's not like sometimes I think you're like me and I really love Bob Dylan. You don't get a call and you're like, Bob Dylan's playing in the field. You know, I don't know how long he's going to go. We got to go see him. You know, there's nothing else. There's nothing else like this. This is a Connecticut warbler. This is a bird I've never seen, period. And they, the Kundurain main very rarely, usually in the fall, they are this skulking warbler. They sort of stay low on the ground, out of sight, hard to get a good look at. In this fall moment, not, you know, not like a stunner of a bird, I would say, identified most easily by the complete eye ring around its eye. But a bird I've been after for a long time, never caught up with. I, in September 2018, 2019 came down to this very spot, walked around these fields and did not find this individual. And man, is that not a fun feeling. But that's a great rarity. Congratulations to Will Sweet. Will Sweet's not here. Will Sweet has found a lot of birds, a lot of birds. Oh, now we're getting into some fun stuff. Scissor tailed flycatcher. Another state bird, anybody know the state bird, the state, Oklahoma's state bird. If you look on the official quarter for Oklahoma, it's got a big old scissor tailed flycatcher on the back. Same with the license plate now. A stunner of a bird, beautiful bird. It's a Southwestern species. It's a flycatcher, but it has a super long tail. It's awesome. And some sort of like pink armpits. It's one of the most beautiful birds we have in the country, but they do not live anywhere near here. But as flycatchers do, migratory flycatchers especially, they often show up in weird places. And in 2014, this one showed up here. This is a picture from Andy Aldrich and seen by Scott Richardson. I was not here at the time. I have seen scissor tailed flycatcher in Maine. I saw one in Brunswick at the airport, which is not as cool as maybe this viewpoint was. But this is a really good bird. And this is one that even non-birders, you know, you show a non-bird of the Connecticut Warbler, they're like, okay, you show them this, you're like, I get it. This is, that's a beautiful bird. Very cool. Awesome. Little egret. This is a little egret. Little egrets are, this is the number two. Little egrets, when I, you know, hooded warbler breeding in Massachusetts, that's okay. Little egrets live in Africa and Europe. As happens occasionally, so, you know, over there, it's the same deal as here. Birds are moving north and south as the seasons, right? Up and down. And occasionally, birds will fly over the ocean accidentally or get pushed or something and show up on the other side of the continent. And that's what happened, presumably, to this bird, a little egret. This looks very much like our snowy egret. And in the outside of the breeding season where they don't have those two big head plumes, they're really hard to tell apart. There's a difference in the color of the lures, which you got to like get right up to them to see. But in the breeding plumage, they're pretty easy to identify, because we all dangling head feathers. So there are a couple of bunch of records in Maine of little egrets. It's pretty cool because they got blown off course somewhere between Europe and Africa and are just like, I guess I just live here now, you know? They're not like, I got to get back. They're like, I'm just going to do this and we'll be fine. And they are. There's been one or two. It's hard to keep track because they're breeding with snowy egrets and making offspring that could be either one. It's hard to know. But there are either purebred or hybridized egrets at Bills and Farm and Falmouth, Scarborough Marsh. These are birds that are just making the best of the situation that came to them. Pretty cool. And this was just 2021. The number one bird, as I was looking through, is this bird. This is called a white-winged turn. This is an extremely rare bird. I've never seen one in Maine. I don't know if there's been any in Maine since I was a bird. May not look like much. Turns are some of my favorite species. They are like gulls without the attitude. They're not stealing your ice cream or anything. They're just bounding around being beautiful and small. We have a rare, fairly rare breeding bird in Maine called a black turn. This is its old world counterpart. This bird lives again in Europe and Asia. A white-winged turn. You find them breeding in Google Street view. We found them in Russia. And they are a stunning bird. They are sort of a jet black body with this beautiful white wings and they fly. And it's really sort of unique patterning for any bird. One showed up here on the beach. It was here for just a couple of days. Only a couple of people saw it in 2003. This is a bird that I would have ... Sometimes I think about being a chaser. I'm not going to leave my wedding. But what other thing would I ... You know what I mean? Like a friend's wedding? Would I leave that to chase a bird? You got to think about these things. All right. So we're running out of time. We're running out of time. So I'm just going to have to skip. I'm going to have to skip a couple of these. I just want to make sure I have time for questions. So we'll just skip a couple of those. So we did the five most common birds. I'm going to do some of the five rarest birds. Five rarest birds. Yes. Love them. Love them. Can you guess this? Puffin. Atlantic puffin. The pride of Maine. Maine is the only state in America that has breeding populations of Atlantic puffins. These are, I mentioned at the top, Maine is famous for its coast and its rocky islands. That's what these birds are doing. They spend their entire lives out to sea. It's crazy when you become a birder and you realize how many birds just don't just are bobbing around the ocean or flying over the ocean all year long. And the only time they come to shore, the only time they touch rock or grass is when they need to lay eggs, right? And that's what these puffins are doing. They spend their whole lives out to sea, diving down, catching fish. And then when it's time to lay eggs, they're like, I need to go to a place that's safe. I need to go to a place that is close to some fish. So I'm going to go find some offshore islands. And they do. They come to Maine. They live in burrows. So they burrow into the island itself and live down in there. And they spend trade off going out to catch fish and bring them back and going back out. Let's see. Here we go. They breed sort of in the northern Atlantic. So they are more common as you go up into Canada and around and even down to the UK, places like that. But Maine has its southernmost breeding colonies, including Eastern Egg Rock, Matinacus, Petite Manan, places like that. We're watching them very carefully in Maine. As you may have heard, the Gulf of Maine is changing very, very quickly. And the food species for Atlantic puffins and a lot of other birds are shifting. And so people are watching that very closely to see if puffins will have the food they need to continue to live in Maine. They had a good year this year. I do know that much. And we're going to keep watching it and keep doing what we can to protect the Gulf. This is a real niche guy here. Anybody know this bird? This is a bird called a Bicknell's thrush. Bicknell's thrush. This is like a bird's bird. This is one doesn't get a lot of glory. You know, isn't the most attractive, I could say, not to slam it or anything, but is a very highly sought after bird for anyone in the United States. And a bird that a lot of birders fly to Maine or the Northeast to seat, may make dedicated trips to see this. This is a thrush. So same size and shape as a robin, right? And we have a couple other species that look a lot like this. The robin has sort of been outlier and that's how colorful it is. Most of the other thrush species we have are some combination of like brown back and spotted belly. We have like a wood thrush and Swainsons thrush and hermit thrush. This is the Bicknell's thrush. And what makes this bird so special is its choice of habitat. I mean, it lives only, it breeds only at the, at the treeline of Appalachian Mountains in the Northeast. So doesn't, doesn't live like down in the valleys, won't breed sort of at mid level. It breeds only on the small bands of sort of scrub forest towards the treeline of mountains in the Northeast. Why it chooses that, I don't know, that's just its thing, but it does. And it has made this bird not only very sought after, but that's hard habitat to get to. And it's hard for birders to get to. I got mine by sleeping overnight in the saddleback parking lot, hiking up before dawn to the top of the mountain and then finding them at the top up there. If you don't want to do that, which I understand, you can drive up Mount Washington. And increasingly you can take chair lifts or other transportation at places like Saddleback because people travel for this bird. It's a very special bird. Big Nels Rush. And you can see, you know, so they live in Maine and then a couple places in, you know, Gaspe and places like that. But this is a bird that is a real tough one and one of our rarest. All right, this is a little hidden bird. I always have trouble getting this video to play. Here we go. Is that playing? No, come on. Hold on. Hold on. Come on. Come on. But I can't get the video to play. This is a great video. Just imagine a really great video. Well, this is a piping clover hidden in the sand. You can see it right here. Let me see this. Yeah, you know, here's the bill. Piping plovers live on the beach. And they're like, hey, I eat little arthropods out of the sand. I don't want to go make some fancy nest somewhere. I'm just going to live right here. And that works for them. They have evolved to be completely camouflaged. Hence the tricky video. Their backs are the exact color of that sand. If they stood up, you could see that the piping, the black piping around his forehead and neck exactly matches the color that dried seaweed that they're in right there. And they love it. They're doing great, living their best life. Until we came along and started using the beaches differently, right? You know, beach nesting birds did fine before humans came along with our dogs and our cars and our blankets and stuff. And so piping clovers and lease turns, one of our other beach nesting birds, populations really crashed in Maine. This is another species that I could have put in the York County specialties area because they only breed on sandy beaches. Maine only has sandy beaches up to about Popham, right? So most every sandy beach down here in York County has populations of piping clovers on them. But they were in real trouble. Here's what they look like. It's sort of a weird picture. You're sort of in the middle of a scratch or something. But you can see the black piping. You can see the sort of camouflage there. Here we go. This is their records in York County. You can see all up and down, right? Basically every sandy beach. Don't worry about the different colors in there. Maine Audubon got involved in the early 80s. And guess what? It works. Conservation works. Can you believe it? We have clover crews on the beaches every summer going around to identify nests to cordon them off. So predators like foxes and cats don't get in work with towns to make sure that nests aren't disturbed. And they're coming back. They're doing great. This slide is out of date. That's 2015. We have well over 200 individuals now or birds fledged now. So it's going pretty incredibly. All right. Okay. Now we're getting into this fun stuff. This is some more. So this was left over when I did the presentation, not for York County. So this is back onto some vagrants, which just makes my I like Pavlov when I hear that or the dogs, I guess. I started salivating when I hear about vagrants. When I talk about some of our vagrant birds, I'm going to talk about some of our rarest birds. I'll talk about some vagrant birds. There are different puffin species in the country. Do you know that? Out in the Pacific, they have other species. And this is sort of, you know, it's maybe not the greatest reason why. Now that there's some more ice free passages over Northern Canada, there's more interchange between Pacific and Atlantic birds. And so birds that were traditionally sort of stopped by the ice are finding their way into different oceans. And that includes that dark puffin in the middle. That's a tufted puffin. Tufted puffin. It's a bird you could see in Alaska or in off the coast of California or Washington. One showed up in Maine this summer, just bebopping around. It was seen a couple times by some researchers on three different seabird islands, I think. And an exciting bird, a bunch of birders, you know, charter boats and one after it. I don't think anybody saw it, but that's what we do out there bobbing around trying to find it. That's a really great one. A couple others were like nationally famous. And I got to talk about these. When I returned to work for Minnautobah in the end of 2018, this bird was making headlines. This is a great black hawk. This bird until this individual had never been seen in the United States. This is a bird that lives in southern Mexico down into South America. One day in the middle of 2018, there was a guy at a hawk watch in southern Texas and a great black hawk flew over his head. He said, whoa, that's the first time anyone's seen one in the country. That's cool. Flew away, never saw it again. Then a couple months later, a bird in Bitterford pool was looking around and said, what is that? Took some pictures, and it was a great black hawk. And there was controversy, and people were analyzing the foliage in the pictures to see if I get a little time out. This happens at birding, by the way. People will fake a sighting. People will say they saw a bird somewhere, and then people will go in and analyze the metadata, or they'll find some palm tree in the background that doesn't live in Maine. People are doing these Bitterford pool pictures, because they said no way. But they not only got good pictures, but they got pictures that you could compare the photos, the feathers, to see it was the same individual. So that bird flew over Texas and just flew to Maine. Everywhere in between, all those other dumb states didn't see it, but we saw it. It was in Bitterford pool, then it disappeared for another one. Nobody knows where it was. So the bird on the eastern prom in Portland saw a great black hawk. And then it took up residence in Deering Oaks Park, downtown Portland, through the winter from 2018 to 2019. It was amazing. And it was a great opportunity for Maine Audubon, because we brought thousands of people. We got school kids from King Middle School. We got passers-by that didn't know any bird from one other, seeing one of the rarest birds in the country. There were people flying all the way over from everywhere in the country to find this bird. And it was a great, for you know, I've chased birds where you got to hike up some mountain and you're sweating. This bird, you go to Holy Donut and you go to the park and you're looking. It was awesome. It was awesome. Sad ending. Sad ending. And many vagrant birds have sad endings. They are far from their homes. They may not know how to feed themselves in this new environment, but they may not be ready to withstand the weather. This bird, you can see on that picture on the left, this is a tropical hawk, right? Tropical hawks don't need to worry about keeping themselves warm. And so this bird has evolved these very long, bare legs, right? That's fine if you're living in the tropics. Not good if you live in Maine or if you live anywhere where there's snow. If you think about like a snowy owl or a rough-legged hawk, they have feathers all the way down covering the feet because you need to stay warm. It was a very cold winter, 2018 to 2019. And after a particularly cold snap, this bird was found with frostbite on its legs, brought to Avian Haven. They attempted their best, but wasn't able to survive. That's okay. When this happened, I thought this was the be-all and doll of Maine birds. Does anybody know where I'm going with this? Oh, wait. No, let me say. Oh, sorry. I can't see my slides. We did a cool thing. This bird was so cool and such a story in Portland that they made a bronze statue of the Great Black Hawk in Portland. I don't know that any, I've never heard of a statue to a vagrant bird anywhere else. Honestly, it's amazing. So you can go to Gearing Oaks right now and there's a very cool statue of this bird chasing. If you go down on the pedestal, there's some squirrels trying to hide from it on the pedestal. Very cool. So Portland did it right. But guess what? We beat that bird. It's not a competition. Everybody wins. But I never thought any bird could top a grade back on until does anybody see this bird? Raise your hand if you saw this bird. A couple. Got to. Got to. Holy moly. This bird is a Stellar's Sea Eagle. This is the largest eagle in the world and this is one of the rarest birds of any kind in the world. This is a bird that people in Maine and America knew about, but no one thought they would see it. This bird lives only in like Siberia, the sort of coastal Siberia and then down into like northern Japan, the Korean Peninsula in the winter. It goes north and south between Siberia and northern Japan. You know, northern, you know, Siberia is not the highest on my travel list. I would love to see this bird, but I didn't think I was gonna, right? Only about 4,000 left in the world. So one of the rarest birds of prey in the world, extremely rare, but, but amazing looking. Huge with this huge bill honking thing. An incredible bird. I don't know where this slide goes, so let's, okay, yeah. This story is so fun. So let's just recap. August of 2020, there's a bird in Alaska who sees a Stellar's Sea Eagle near Denali National Park. That's, that's great, but weird things happen in Alaska. Any bird knows that like weird stuff happens in Alaska. And there have been Stellar's Sea Eagles seen in Alaska before. It's right across the ocean, you know, the sea from where they are, a couple have come over, mostly on the coast. So this inland record, even Alaska, was interesting. But people said, okay, that's great. What am I gonna do? And there was nothing, no news until March 2021, where a guy on a boat at a reservoir in southern Texas took a picture of a Stellar's Sea Eagle. And people said, what? What are you talking about? And people said, again, there were people who went out to the spot and they, to find the snag that the bird was pictured on to see, to make sure this was a real picture, taken in the United States, and it was. But as birders know, again, sometimes birds escape from captivity or escape from zoos. So we said, I don't know what to say. How did this thing get to Texas? Let's think about something else. And then in July that summer, birders on the Restague River on the border between New Brunswick and Quebec saw Stellar's Sea Eagle. And not only that, they got pictures and compared them with the Alaskan pictures to, again, I'd be able to identify that this was the same bird that flew probably from Siberia to Alaska to Texas to Quebec and was bouncing around. And that was awesome. But again, this was the height of the pandemic, couldn't go to Canada. It was hard to find even in Canada. So very few, relatively few people saw it up there. We were all at the border. Come again. Couldn't do it. Couldn't do it. I was with Bill Graven in December of 2021, during the Christmas bird count in New York County, having a great time. Christmas bird counts for people who do them know they're serious business. You're counting birds all day long and you need to be together as a team. I got a message on my phone that said the people who are selling, seeing a Stellar's Sea Eagle in Massachusetts. And I said, see you later. I said, sorry, buddy. And I left. I've never done that. I've dished the CBC and me and a couple of other people drove down the Taunton River, Massachusetts. And oh my goodness, there was a Stellar's Sea Eagle on the river with a bunch of other Baldigos. Holy Moses. And I thought that was it. I thought that was that was a highlight. I was on cloud 1000. But it wasn't over yet. Just a few days later at the very end of the month. I was, so birders do this, birders trying to keep track of all the birds I see in a year. It was the end of the year. So I'm trying to like, I got the pass from my wife to she'll take the kid I was gonna go out and try to find some birds. And it's never that fun. I was looking for some dumb sparrow in a auto shop parking lot. Not a particular, it wasn't in a park or anything. And it was a gray gloomy day. And I was like, this stinks. And so I was just checking my phone and I'd written a blog on my thing about how I went down to Massachusetts. And I see that there's a comment on my blog. And the comment is, it's in five islands main. And I said, okay, no photo, no info. And so I sleuthed on my phone, I was able to find this lady's Instagram profile. And I messaged her. And I said, Hey, did you leave that thing? Do you have any photos? And she said, bro, sure. And it was a Stellar's Eagle in Booth by Harbor, or in five islands off Georgetown. And so I said, read alert. I got the word out. And the entire main community, every burger went up to five islands. Is anybody there that first day at five islands while the lobster man coming in? It was awesome. The last day of 2021, we're on this wharf and there are these poor lobster men who are just trying to get all their traps out. It's this big important day for them. They're just trying to close up. It's freezing cold. And all of a sudden they wake up in the morning and there's like 3000 burgers on their wharf. And there are cars blocking me. There's no parking anywhere. And everyone's there. And they're just like, what, what is happening here? But then they then the seagull flew over and everyone cheered and was hugging and they got into it too. For a while, the bird was sort of perched behind out of sight behind some rocks. And so some enterprising lobster men were for 20 bucks would give you a ride in their boat. That bird stayed from between Bar Harbor and or between five islands and Booth Bay for months for a couple of months and was seen by thousands of people from all over the country. Again, an absolute dream bird. This bird does not have a sad ending as a good ending. So the seagulls, if you look at a range map, if you want right there, Maine is not that far off from Siberia and from, you know, northern Japan. So this bird is equipped to live in cold climates and has been doing fine. This bird not only survived the main winter, but it survived entire summer in Newfoundland. And we don't know where it is right now, but we think I think it's on its way back here because it's doing its normal north south migration just in a new place doing the best it can, working its way back. So for folks who haven't seen it yet, hang on, watch the wires, watch the headlines. I was on live TV in Brazil talking about this bird. I was on a morning show in Nebraska talking about this bird. This bird is a phenomenon. So the rarest bird in Maine. There we go. Very cool. That's all I got. Thank you very much. Thank you. I wanted to leave time for questions. Does anybody have questions? And I can stop to share, stop my share to see if, and I will answer questions about anything. Birds or books. I have books. I have a couple. I have more in the car. I didn't know how many people would show up, but I have some books. Great. Awesome. Sure. There has not been a dedicated field guide to the state of Maine since the late 90s, and that book had like 100 some odd species in it. This is part of a series from the American Birding Association with photographs by a guy named Brian Small. Beautiful photographs. Two over 260 species that you find in Maine. The two hardest things about putting this together was number one, choosing what was 270 that wasn't getting in. That was hard. It was, I think, a 40-shear water. I didn't make the cut. The other was choosing the photo. So they just gave me the setting. You know how this works? I don't know how this works. He was like, here's this thumb drive with 50 million amazing photos of this bird. So for every species that have to go in and look through all these photos and select one or two, that illustrated the points and where the right clue for Maine and things like that. And so it's a really great book. It was a really honor to put it together. I loved Burning in Maine. I have to shout out Peter Vickery's Birds of Maine book, which was released just the year before, ostensibly, which is not a field guide, is a giant informational book about everything of the birds of Maine. I encourage you to get that too. It's not one you want to bring outside with you, but it helped me immensely trying to figure out many things from this book. And this is beautiful. It's just, it's great. I mean, it was really an honor to put it together and put it out. That's a great question. If you go back to the 50s and 60s, there are almost no cardinals in Maine, almost none. It really is a bird of traditionally southern areas. We have given them places to live is really why they're cardinals here. Cardinals love shrubs and bushes and things like that. And as humans have moved north, we plant those things. We get rid of sort of the woods and around our backyards and our side yards, we plant the bushes that they love and need. There weren't really a lot of those. Cardinals are taking advantage of kind of planting great habitat for them to come up. And now they're all over the state. Yeah. Oh, sorry. Is Audubon doing the March Walks on Wednesdays? The Scarborough March Walks? Yeah. Good question. I don't think we are this time of year. Maine Audubon operates a bunch of sanctuaries around the state for you to open to the public. All year round. We don't own Scarborough March, but we have a center there. Scarborough March is an incredible birding spot in Scarborough. And they run weekly, I think summertime only. I don't know if they're still going now, sorry, walks through there. So if you ever want to go on a bird walk, come check it out. We do still do the Thursday morning bird walks at Gilson Farm, our headquarters in Falmouth with my colleague Doug Hitchcock. Well, I want to thank everyone for coming. It was really great to see people in person and have a great night.