 I'm so glad we are able to do this right now. We were really disappointed to have to cancel the in-person festival this year. We were very excited, but that's the way it goes right now in 2020, but we're making the best of it. So we are excited to present you with a full slate of presentations about the birds and birding in the area of Rangeley, Maine, an incredible part of the state, and one we're really proud to highlight. And one, I should say as well, we really hope that you, if you're not living there now, which a lot of people look like they're tuning in from, that you can visit either for our next year's festival, which we promise will be in person, while we very much hope will be in person, or any other time of year. It's an amazing four-season destination. And we really hope that this virtual festival serves as sort of an appetizer, a nice tease that will get you to come to the actual festival next year because as great as these presentations are, nothing will replace the experience of actually being in gorgeous Rangeley, looking at these beautiful birds firsthand. So we wanna sort of wet your whistle and give you as much info about the beauty in birds of Rangeley, while still encouraging you to hopefully join us in person next year. So just a few housekeeping things. First of all, my name is Nick Lund. I'm the Outreach and Network Manager at Maine Audubon. We are one of the sponsors of this event. I have everybody, I'm turning off videos as they come in and trying to mute participants. This is just to keep things running smoothly and so make sure there's not background noise. If you are not muted, sometimes Zoom is a little funky, please make sure you mute your computers and turn off your own video. That's helpful. If there are questions, please type them into the chat. I will be moderating the chat box there, which you see down towards the bottom of the screen in the middle with a little speech bubble thing. I will be helping ask Doug and all the presenters those questions as we move forward. So that's the place to do it. I'll wade through all the great locations that people are tuning in from. Welcome to Arizona, Bangor, Maryland, Florida, fantastic. So we have three hours of programming for you this morning. And Doug, if you could actually go to the next slide so we can take a look at the agenda. Thank you. Here's the agenda over the next two days. So this morning, starting in just a few minutes, we have our own world famous staff naturalist, Doug Hitchcox, one of the best birders in the state of Maine and who knows the birds of range as well as anybody. We're talking about the birds of rangely. At 10, we have Dr. Peter McKinley from the Wilderness Society, talking about Mount Abraham and all the, a great presentation about the different ecosystems and environments of the rangely area. And then at 11, we have a very cool video presentation, the virtual loon cruise, which we really sort of scrambled quickly to put this together as we decided to go virtual. We went out and filmed the loon cruise given by Kevin Sinit and his company. And it's awesome. The video just was finalized yesterday. There's biologists on board and they see loons on the nest and loons swimming around. So I really encourage you to check that out at 11. For those joining again tomorrow, yours truly is gonna kick it off with a great presentation about impacts to bird populations in Maine called the State of the Birds. We have a great rangely based photographer, Nick Ledley from touchthewildphotos.com is giving a presentation about wildlife photography 101. And then we are wrapping things up at 11 a.m. with Professor Brian Olson from University of Maine with his keynote presentation about field guides, the science of species and field guides. So we've got a great lineup for you and we're eager to get started. Before we do, I wanna turn it over to Mr. David Miller from the Rangely Lakes Heritage Trust to give you a welcome and to say hello. Thank you, Nick. I wanna welcome everybody and thanks so much for joining us. This, as Nick said, the festival's in its second year and we had to go virtual this year for obvious reasons. My name is David Miller. I am the Executive Director of Rangely Lakes Heritage Trust. We are a land trust that's been up here for almost 27, 28 years, working to conserve the lands and waters of this incredible part of the state. People have talked about doing a birding festival up here forever. When I came into this job, I met with Nick Ledley and some others and we, as Doug said earlier, we decided that the most important thing we could do in birding was to make this a birding destination. And so we took it from there. Maine Audubon and others jumped on board to help us create the first festival, which was small but very successful. And I do wanna thank some of our sponsors who helped getting us going, getting this going, and also who have helped funded this year. So first of all, a shout out to Maine Audubon, one of the premier conservation groups in the state. And we could not be doing this and could not have even done last year without Doug, Nick, Laura, and others. So thanks to all of you. Derek Loverch at Freeport Wild Birds Supply help us start this. He can't be with us this year on the webinar, but we hope to have him back next year. Dr. Pete McKinley, the Wildness Society is helping us develop the region as a birding destination. Nick Ledley, our photographer in town, funding for this year from the Maine Office of Tourism and the Betterment Fund and also Maine Mountain Media who did the Lune cruise and look to help us in the future as well. And then our local businesses, which includes the Rangeley Inn across the street from where I am, a great historical hotel. Please consider staying there next year. And Rangeley Region Lakes Cruises, Kevin Sinet, who did our Lune cruise. Let me just spend one or two minutes talking about the region. So if you've been here, you know that you've probably driven up from sea level or close to it. You hit Farmington on the way up here about 50 minutes south. That's about 400 foot elevation. Rangeley is 1600 feet above sea level. And then we go all the way up above 4,000 feet to Saddleback. That gives us quite a range of habitat. And because we're so close and more accessible than many other areas, this area is just a birding, it should be a birding haven and a destination for more and more birders. And last thing, so we sit in the middle of Maine's Western Mountains. And on a macro scale, we sit in the middle of the largest continuous temperate forest in North America. It goes from the Northern Appalachians to the tip of Quebec. This area has been largely unnoticed by the world. It's going to be getting increasing notice because it's incredible biodiversity. We have many of the last remaining brook trout and the wild brook trout in North America, breeding populations of warblers and boreal species that are hard to... Region is an incredible buffer against the effects of climate change. So I want to invite all of you to come up here and join us to have fun, look for birds and consider how you can help us conserve this region as we move into the future. It's going to be more and more important to all of us. So again, thank you very much, especially to Nick and Doug for pulling this together and all of our sponsors. And look forward to our time together today. All right, thank you, David. So let's get started without further ado. I do want to say one quick thing. This is being recorded. We will put up links to the entire festival, today's session and tomorrow's session as soon as we can. Probably, I don't know, but they'll be definitely ready early next week. So stay tuned and you won't miss a thing. And now we'd like to turn it over to our own world famous Doug Hitchcox to talk about the Birds of Rangeley. So welcome, Doug, welcome everyone and take it away. All right, thank you, Nick. Thank you everyone listening in wherever you are. Looked like a great list, especially from around the world, that was great. I saw people were raising hands and things in the chat. I'm going to close the chat while I'm presenting. Maybe I'll leave it up to Nick to kind of speak up if there is an issue or something. Otherwise I have a lot to cover and would like to keep us on schedule to wrap up around 10. So please, if you have questions, post them in the chat. We'll try to answer them there. I hope to wrap up a little before 10 so that we can kind of see if there are looming questions, but otherwise my plan is for this to be just kind of a straightforward presentation. Really just to talk about this subject, the Birds of Rangeley. And I really want to be emphasizing the where to go and who you'll see. So one of the big goals with this festival is to kind of show people some of these areas. So I'll start by mentioning a few resources. The first way that I learned about birding in Rangeley is this book that's getting a little outdated now. Jan and Elizabeth Pearson with Peter Vickery wrote this, A Birder's Guide to Maine in 1996. Still kind of a nice resource. It's actually interesting to look at it and sadly not that long ago and how some of the birds they mentioned have actually changed quite a bit. There is a more modern, it's funny to call 1996 not modern, but more recent, 2009, Bob Deschanes' main birding trail also highlights some really great areas of the region. And then more recently, Derek Lovic, bird watching in Maine, just a couple of years old now. So that's always a tough thing with bird books, especially Field Guides are out of date almost as soon as they are published, but fortunately the land doesn't change as much as the birds do. So these are all great resources that really point out a lot of these places. Especially some of these older ones are now available online. The Pearson Vickery book, you can actually find the whole section on Rangeley Lakes, that larger area, is available for free on Google Books. Bob Deschanes has actually digitized the whole Maine birding trail. So some of these sites I'm actually gonna talk about now, you can read his excerpts from the book right on the Mainebirdingtrail.com website. So some of these, I especially just wanted to show like, just because of the time constraints today, there are so many more places than I'll be able to talk about, but these resources really provide you with more and maybe even better information than we'll be able to touch on in this less than one hour talk. Yeah, especially places like Hunter Cove, a property of Rangeley Lakes Heritage Trust. And the rest of America I did. Well, all I have to say is that Tiger King, and I'm pretty sure. We'll make sure people get muted. And then the other thing I wanted to show, it's very easy to use eBird. You've never used eBird before, you can Google it or just eBird.org. Click on the explore tab and then there's explore hotspots. And then you can just do a quick search for Rangeley, Maine. Then you get this very nice map with what I'll call established birding hotspots or might be a little hard to see on a smaller screen here. Those are really a lot of the places that you'll wanna be visiting. So I'll mention a few of these, especially kind of the more unique ones. And then also show one of my favorite ways of bird Rangeley because the habitat is so great. As David mentioned, it is this great sliver of boreal forest. Just about anywhere you go, you can find great birds. So I'll give some tips there. And then the last thing I wanna say, there's even beyond this, there's some places like the Parham Stream that last year Pete McKinley let a bird walk there for the festival. I cut it off, it's just off the right side of this map. So even as you extend out away from, most people think of Rangeley as really just that downtown in Rangeley Lake, but there's great birding all around this area. So a nice thing using that eBird page is that on any one of those hotspots, you can click on them and see what species are being reported there when they were seen most recently. I was up scouting on, what was that, Monday, I guess. That's where you'll see some footage and some photos in the slide deck. You can see I was at height of land. It was a brutal morning to be up, but yeah, then like Hunter Cove I mentioned before, really impressive list of birds that have been seen there. More as a fun one to mention, we're gonna talk about some of these breeding warblers, these boreal specialties, but because it is just such a cool birding location, there have been some bizarre birds over the years and we never know what'll show up next. So here's a little excerpt from the Pearson Vickery book, just talking about kind of the Rangeley Village at downtown Rangeley area, if you wanna call it that. And if you've already scanned this, you might see that last sentence, a single Chilean flamingo of unknown origin appeared on the lake one summer. Needless to say, it caused quite a stir. So yeah, Chilean flamingo, as the name implies, should not be anywhere near Rangeley. Who knows how it got up there. Most likely escaped from a zoo or something, but in trying to find a little more info about it, I found a new publication of me. I've lived in Southern Maine my entire life, apparently we are not in the circulation of the irregular, which is, I love their wonderful slogan, the award-winning weekly newspaper serving Western mountains for Maine, where the kids grow straight and tall and the women aren't good looking. And they had this amazing coverage, September 1982. You can see the quote here, I need to move, I know on my screen, Pink Flamingo decided to make its home on Rangeley Lake much to the local surprise. And this is where I get a real kick out of, while Maine Audubon suggested it was actually a great blue heron, those who saw it firsthand knew otherwise. Two Canadian zoos were contacted to see if one of their flamingos had escaped at the time of this article, only one had responded and it was in the negative. So who knows, to have a flamingo in Maine, it is almost certainly an escapee, but I like to throw that in, you never know what you'll see, even right there in Rangeley. Not a rare bird in Maine, this is Lafingoll that nests all along the, well certainly mid-coast north on islands off shore. But last year in the days, just before the birding festival, I was up doing a little scouting and found this Lafingoll right on Rangeley Lake, which ended up being the first record for Franklin County. But if anything, I like this example because it kind of shows there is a greater biodiversity to that area. This could have been a bird on its way up to the St. Lawrence, using Rangeley Lake as just a stopover on its migration. We know that there's actually more and more seabirds that do that. So who knows, an interesting one, but there's a lot more to Rangeley and its birding than these highlights that we're gonna show. And my prediction, Rangeley Lake is gonna get a brown booby one of these years. So any locals listening, when you spot that brown booby sitting on a mooring out in the middle of the lake, call Maine Audubon, I promise I won't assume that it's a great blue heron like those that person of the 80s did. So a couple of the places I wanted to talk about, I wanted to mention Saddleback Mountain because it's obviously got an interesting history in terms of ownership and accessibility. But from a birding perspective, it is really quite remarkable. I won't go so much into the habitat and what's so unique about it because Pete, I believe the talk right after me is gonna be his talk about Mount Abraham and really getting into that kind of alpine habitat and what makes these mountains so kind of special. Saddleback, what I wanna mention about it and why it has kind of been on the radar of so many birders really thanks to the trail system, the ski trails, really make it a much easier place to access a lot of these birds that otherwise are on these very difficult to climb and access mountains. So here's the classic beautiful Maine scenery, the invasive lupin taking over the slopes, quite beautiful. We were photographing Lincoln sparrows that were nesting right at the base of the mountain there. It is a beautiful spot even if you're just going for a hike, not looking for birds, but a lot of the specialty species that you'll see there, especially because the amount of time and effort that it takes to climb the mountain, putting in the time you're likely to encounter some of the real targets. So this was, I believe two summers ago, FinKind, a Maine birder and I took a hike up, actually slept up on the mountain, which was a fantastic way to experience it and then had things like this blackback woodpecker on the hike back down. Yellow-bellied flycatcher, which is, especially for us here in Southern Maine, is just an uncommon migrant that very quickly passes through at the kind of later weeks of May, but when I was up there a few days ago, there were yellow-bellied flycatchers on territory singing so much easier to find and see than those migrants just passing through. Southern Maine, excuse me, boreal chickadee, very similar to arguably our state bird, the black-capped chickadee, but this is that more Northern ranging bird that is really a big target for a lot of, especially visiting birders from out of state. So especially if you live in the rangely area, this might be a more common bird to you, but for a lot of traveling birders who have never been to Maine, they're going to specifically go to places like rangely because of a bird like this. And even greater motivator to get people to travel from all over is this bird, the Bicknell's thrush, which I'm sure Pete will probably be talking about more, so I won't go too much into their life histories, but this is a very range-restricted bird. I pulled this map from the IUCN red list just to zoom in, just appreciate it a bit better. It's really a high alpine species, and again, just because of the scope of this talk, we won't go too much into it, but that high alpine habitat is certainly one that's really at risk of changes due to global warming and climate change. So you can see it's an incredibly restricted breeding range, especially because of that habitat requirement. And then even in the winter, some of these islands in the West Indies that it really depends on, again, kind of saying in a bit of elevation, but it's remarkable what a small population this bird has. And to be able to go someplace like for me, living just outside of Portland, and just over a couple of hours in the car, I can be up to rangely and then have a absolutely beautiful hike up place like Saddleback, or some of these other mountains as we'll be talked about. And then to see something like Bicknell's thrush breeding there in this photo, and I guess the one before it, you can see it's got a mouthful of insects, and that is, I was hoping to talk about the main bird Atlas a little bit, but time will be tight, so you'll see some references to it later, but this would be considered a confirmed breeding record, which is a great thing for us to be seeing and appreciating here in Maine. And I just want to drive home that point that for all of our birds or almost all of them, we need these insects on the landscape. That is the food that's creating the next generation of birds. And to see the amount of biodiversity in this bird's mouth is just awesome. All sorts of Lepidoptera larva, those little caterpillars that are gonna become probably varying species of moths. Looks like some maybe ants or something up top. It really just kind of shows the, there's a greater biological value in the area. So one thing we did as part of the festival, folks who had tried registering for it or signing up for some of their trips, one of them that you might have noticed, we were calling our Boreal Blitz Van Trip. And what I wanted to show was kind of the route that I had put together for that last year. Some of these spots actually changed quite dramatically just between last year and this year when I was up checking them out earlier this week. But I thought this would be a fun way to kind of talk about some of the areas to bird, what you'll see and really some of these, the non-hot spots that you can pick to go to. So the route that I had kind of planned, hopefully everyone gets the orientation here, you can see using Rangeley Lake and especially Route 17, which depending on how you come into Rangeley might be a common way to take. Height of land is kind of that Southern most point with a little blue pin, the Abolation Trail crosses right along there. So for the festival, we had these two van trips, one of them started at the Northern end point along this Route 17 extending up onto, I guess that's like 16 West, hitting kind of a nice diversity of habitats. And this was in just a few hours of birding in the morning, I should have looked up the number of species, but I found it impressive, just the diversity that could be found right along this route. I guess I would say, you know, you can always, if you wanna reference the recording later, you can certainly find some of these points just in Ebird by searching. But if you wanna write, I guess if you wanna write down these, the latitude, longitude of these, or just, you know, hopefully in the next few slides you'll see how I pick some of the places that I wanna go birding. So I believe this is the next point North of that Southern point, the height of land. Height of land is a wonderful spot just because of the beautiful scenic overlook. I'll play a video that I tried taking there the other day in a minute and you'll see some of the problems that arise. But, you know, just looking around strangely on an aerial map, you can start picking out where you might expect to find some birds. You know, essentially, you can see this patch of forest here had been cut over. You can actually see the different tracks kind of through the woods, you know, clear cuttings not, fortunately not a thing anymore, but, you know, still quite drastic what's done in the forest and the interesting patterns that it leaves. But I look for, you know, what are these little patches that are gonna attract some of the birds we're looking for just to zoom in a little bit more? I found this spot just, again, just by zooming around the road, looking at the maps and finding this little path that went up to this large clearing. I couldn't find the date on it here. This is several years old now. You can see essentially scorched earth there. When I was burning it last year, it was regenerating. It had what was probably like two-year-old growth on it. And it's that early successional habitat, that edge habitat that a lot of kind of, some of the specialty species that we'll be looking for, really like little patches like that. So I think this is one thing I wanna mention, but I guess not go into too much at this point. You know, for me to just be burning along Route 17, you know, finding a little parcel of land off the side of the road like this, you know, there's an interesting discussion to be had about permissions and using land. So I wanna emphasize always that our recommendation is to always get permission from landowners before you go on any private land. Rangeley Lake Heritage Trust has a fantastic job marking their properties, especially where there's trail systems. But for some of these little patches, which is honestly like one of my favorite ways to go up and bird rangeleys, is just, you know, test and try these different areas. You know, Maine is a unique state that we operate on what's called a implied permission structure. So if the land is not posted, you can, in this case, go birding on it. So again, always ask for permission if you can, but, you know, a chunk of land like this randomly out on Route 17, I don't even know where I would start to start asking. And fortunately, as birders, and I should especially take a second to mention that, you know, this is, I'm saying this with an extreme amount of white privilege. Sure, everyone is aware of what's going on in the news right now, especially some of the discussions that birders are having with Mr. Cooper and Central Park. And it's, you know, birding is very different for different people. So I'll acknowledge that do what you are most comfortable with, but this is how I approach birding and rangeleys. But always ask for permission. So this is what I found, literally just driving on 17, there's a little place to pull over on the side of the road and hiking up this image on the right, you can see that regenerating cut. And this is perfect habitat. Again, that kind of two year old, you know, new growth coming in. This is perfect habitat for one bird that I know is a big target for a lot of birders in the region or visiting the region. Morning Warbler, M-O-U-R-N. Morning Warbler, this is a male, as soon as you find, you know, a nice regenerating cut like this, generally just takes a little bit of listening, learning their call, or especially one of my favorite things about birding rangeleys is beyond the typical songs. You hear all sorts of interesting calls and what are often called like alternate songs of these birds because they're on their breeding grounds. You know, again, Morning Warbler, we're lucky to see in Southern Maine as just a migrant passing through. But on the breeding grounds, behaviors become quite interesting. If you can hear that recording, it's a sharp little call note. This was that Morning Warbler. Clearly, I was unable to find the nest of this bird looking for the atlas, but it was clearly a little agitated with me around. Another bird I found, this was literally just on the side of Route 17, where I had pulled over across the road from that spot. I found this pair of northern perulas nesting, which is always, you know, again, I will emphasize this over and over that I find one of the coolest things about birding rangeleys is to see these birds that are otherwise hard to detect in places like Southern Maine or, you know, South of here, maybe. But then once you get into this really abundant and high quality habitat, that's what they're there for. They're there to breed, take a, excuse me, and to take advantage of that natural seasonal abundance of food, that's what they're there for. It's a fun one to look at. If you've never seen these maps, this should maybe be your homework assignment after this festival to go on to ebird.org. You click on the tab that says science, you can then get these visualizations. And these are abundance maps generated just from submissions from checklists that were submitted to the ebird database from people like you and me, just reporting what birds we saw, when and where, and with how much effort. And then we can be able to watch these. So let's watch Northern Perula going from their wintering range, migration in the spring. And here they come and look at how dense those abundances truly in Northern Maine. Now, jump ahead and here's just kind of a nice breakdown of their year based on the different season and what they're doing. And a fun thing with Northern Perulas, you can almost see this kind of separation of a nice red swath that cuts through Maine, kind of west towards Minnesota. And you can see there's this migratory, that yellow section that almost then bisects the southern part of the range where they're also breeding. And what's so cool to see there is there's actually this essentially two populations of Northern Perulas and they're divided by the, what they used to build their nests out of. So I can hop back real quick. You may notice it's building its moss or it's nests out of this lichen, the old man's beard, Usnia, better word for it, where down south in the southern part of their range they're gonna use Spanish moss. So a fun one to see, especially as you walk around the various locations and start seeing again the abundance of something like the Usnia growing on trees. And when you think about that being such an important resource for this little warbler like the Northern Perula, for me it helps me appreciate some of those locations as well. So I just wanted to kind of show off a lot of these places that we picked just along the Boreal Blitz van trip. Nothing special about them except that they were accessible in a long route 17. So you can find places like this all along, all over the place in Rangeley. These ones I just found because they had a spot on the side of the road big enough to pull over the large bands that we were moving people around in the festival with. So here's a nice kind of mixed forest. This spot was loaded with Blackburnian warblers which are a nice common warbler across Rangeley. It's always funny in migration. We love seeing them down here but it's an easy bird to see up there. Yeah, and even I believe this is my window across town road as it's called. This nice dirt road that extends off of 17. Same thing, a little opening in the forest with kind of a nice mix of habitats throughout and it's amazing what birds you can pick up from there. And then going all the way, I believe this is the northernmost point on that road we put together. I won't talk about things like loons here. You'll have a wonderful, I believe at 11 o'clock, a wonderful virtual loon cruise that you can take. But again, just emphasize that there's fantastic habitat really all over. And here's just this little stretch. We really picked it because it was nice centrally located right around Rangeley, easy to get to from the center. But extending, if you continue driving west on 16, one of my favorite things to do is just look for like moose trails where they've been crossing the road and cutting through and you'll find these great little kind of alder patches. And you can see a nice mix of, there's Tamarack trees, pines, like, you know, so things like alder flycatcher, you know, really quite thick up in this area. Oh, and one of my favorite, the only time I've ever seen common golden night chicks, you know, again, with my southern coastal bias, we typically just see golden eyes, you know, on the ocean throughout the winter, maybe in rivers as well. But to know that they're up in Rangeley, nesting, you know, in tree cavities, and then you get these awesome little zebra-looking chicks, never know what you'll encounter. So one thing I tried doing on Monday, I thought it would be more fun than me just showing pictures and talking. I thought I would go up to Rangeley and try shooting some video, doing more of kind of a virtual experience of Rangeley, but there are a few challenges. So I'm gonna try, I'll show you the first video. Unfortunately, this morning it's quite windy. This is the west, northwest. And it's in the low thirties this morning, June 1st. So I'll cut that one off real quick to say, I did not expect there to be a frost in the morning when I got there. It was also a strong wind. That point I was standing at was height of land, that spot that I mentioned along 17. We found it to be one of, it really became one of my favorite spots during the festival last year. On the first fan trip we did, we started there right at, sorry, our first spot of the morning, we got to experience the dawn chorus. There were just loads of birds singing warblers. We got to watch Blackburnian warblers gathering nesting material. And it's just a wonderful kind of scenic overlook. When I was there in that cold and strong wind, I think I had maybe eight species on my list. So all these places that I mentioned will always have some challenges. As I left there, I'll play this video. This was just a fun encounter. I'll try turning the audio off. So I'm driving on route 17 past and trying to get to Boy Scout Road. It's actually nice out of the wind here. It's a lot better than it was higher up. I just pulled over on the side of the road and I just had a bobcat cross right in front of me. It's actually this little kind of rocky crossing on the side. So almost certainly following along that. So I just stopped hoping that it might come back out, but I'm pretty sure it was hearing of the car and just kept moving. It is nice to hear the increased bird song here out of the wind. I'd be able to hear there's a Ruby Crown Kinglet that's singing quite loudly out the window. Often sound like they're almost on a skipping record or something. A tough one to hear in that recording, but yeah, Ruby Crown Kinglets, we're all over the place up there. I'll keep, I might cut some of these videos short just to keep us on a better schedule for the morning, but as I mentioned at the start of that video, one of the places I was trying to get to and what I really wanted to highlight here because it was a very popular spot during last year's festival. We did a number of walks there. Derek Lovitch led most of those, but the Boy Scout Road, this is one that I had read about in that originally in the, I think the Pearson Vickery book, but kind of over many trips up and years of going, I've learned how to bird this long stretch of road a little bit better. Definitely want to give the shout out as you'll find on the signs as you bird the road. That land is conserved by a range of the Lakes Heritage Trust. And you can hopefully in the next few slides, you'll see why we appreciate it so much. So I'll give this video a try, sorry if the audio quality is not as great through Zoom as I had hoped. So we've made it to maybe one of the best known spots in Rangeley, was talked about at least. The Boy Scout Road is one of these spots that might be able to find it on a map, but birding it can be a little interesting. So right along Room 16 here, the Boy Scout Road is this dirt road that basically just extends right along the kind of Bego River. So it's a really nice slice of some rural habitat. That little riparian mix in really kind of gives us some nice habitat, really good birds that we can find right along here. With more time, my favorite way is to usually just park along 16 here and kind of spend as much time as I want slowly walking the road. There are a few, maybe better hotspots to stop along the road. So today, where time's a little restricted, I'm gonna take my car, drive down it, kind of bird with the window rolled down and stop at a few key spots. We'll see how the road looks. It looks a little wet down there, but me and my trusty Prius, hopefully the next video isn't me pushing it out of the mud. So we'll see how it goes. So stop when we find some birds. So I'll apologize, this was not scripted. So any hesitation, you're getting the full effect of birding with Doug and inrangely. I did have an e-bird list which created this nice map, just to show kind of the route that I covered. So you can see kind of within that first, maybe half mile stretch, I actually got out, walked through the woods a little bit. There's various places that you can kind of pull over. As you can see kind of to the east of that blue track, where I was walking about halfway up it, there's actually a really nice dog out there. I actually got quite distracted and almost had too much fun birding. So didn't get to hit all the spots that I wanted to, but getting all the way up kind of past where the river gets its closest approach to the road, you'll actually access this old Boy Scout camp. Part of how it gets the name there, but I'll hit next. Here is just one stretch of road. It's always, it tends to be right at the beginning of the Boy Scout road, that the road can be a little hairy, especially in a Prius. Past road for Prius, too deep. As you can see, they're sailing past this. Four seconds happen. So, spoiler alert, nothing bad happened. Any salt that I had on the underside of my Prius from the winter was clearly taken off by the end of this. Bottomed out in a number of spots. So I would maybe recommend finding a vehicle with a little better clearance than my poor little car. But anyways, I'll be taking donations at the end if anyone wants to contribute to my next car fund. But birding along Boy Scout road, as soon as I got back in the car, it was great to see things like this black cap chickadee gathering nesting material, which was fun, especially, I won't go into the bird atlas, but we've been, we're trying to document birds breeding around the state. And in Southern Maine, I've been watching chickadees nesting for weeks. And so fun to see that up there, just how kind of later in the sea, or excuse me, it's still early in the nesting season for a lot of birds in that range of the area. So here's our chickadee-carrying nesting material. This young male American red star is just singing its heart out. And the thing that I love to do, and this is what really took up a lot of my time, was I do a lot of audio recording. And there was a little bit of wind noise, but almost all over Southern Maine, really most of New England, noise pollution is a huge issue. It's the noise that comes off of 95 and 295, especially trying to record birds. You always end up with cars, horns, planes are an issue as well, but rangerly is by far one of my favorite places to record birds because you don't have to worry about, the only thing that might ruin your recording is other birds singing in the background. So going up the road a little further, you'll find the entrance into the Boy Scout camp. I've never not seen it gated. I assume it gets open for certain times of the year. But honestly, you really just want to be walking it at this point, because this is some great birding. It opens up to this, you know, again, kind of getting these nice edges in the habitat, it's certainly easier to bird than just trying to prompt around in the forest. You'll know you're there. There's all sorts of signage and things, as it says, Kennebago Scout camp here. And one of my big targets, we'll watch this for. Big targets of this festival is the Beggar Seres Kong, which is a funny listening back, that kind of sounds like Harry, but I won't critique myself. Stealing this nice, kind of just bruises and there's actually all sorts of signs that Black Beggars are around. Maybe you see it on this tree here. Black Beggs are kind of famous for just like almost flicking away the bark, the little invertebrates that are right below that top layer of bark rather than drilling in and making holes, as we think of woodpeckers typically doing. There's some older markings, but there's some real fresh stuff in here too. We saw same thing last year, some older markings, but this is the first I've seen some fresh stuff. So we'll give it a little more time. So anyways, here's some other shots. Like it was amazing to see just all around. So you can especially see on the trunk, I guess the second trunk in from the left. When you get that more reddish color on some of these spruces where the barks just been recently taken off or that trunk over towards the right. Here's a closer look at a very fresh spot. The whole length of the trunk had just been visited. And then what's fun to see looking at some of this, you can see the markings along the bark there. So it's what are often called bark beetles or engraver beetles. And you can see that kind of the palest color there, those little swirls on it is from where those beetles were eating along the bark. And so those woodpeckers are just trying to go after that. So I unfortunately didn't have, I didn't see any blackback woodpeckers on that trip, but based on just the amount of fresh activity right in the scout camp, I'm sure if I had had more time, one would have come in eventually. And at the scout camp, it also leads right down to the Kennebago River. So it's a really nice spot to see there. I had things like common golden eye along the river. This overview is great for things like broadling hawks, belated kingfishers were hunting along this. So, and I'm sure this video, the audio is not terribly loud. This is just a little before the camp, where you can hear things like northern perula singing, both golden crown and ruby crown kinglets. It was loaded with all their fly catchers. You know, bitterns are in this area, American bitterns, a bunch of common yellow throats down below. So you can kind of see the nice mix of habitat. The woods behind me were loaded with things like oven birds, black-throated green warblers, Nashville's were super abundant. And then one bird that was just deafening all over the place, one of my favorite warblers because they're just beautiful, the Magnolia warbler. ["Magnolia Warbler"] That's not what they sound like, but they do sound like this. Weed-weed-weedio. This recording is actually up that hurt. So just to keep going, keep on schedule, Gray Jays, or excuse me, Canada Jays, as we call them now. Canada Jays are one of my favorite birds to experience and across Northern Maine and rangerly being one of the best places to see them. They go by all sorts of names. Now it's officially Canada Jays. You speak Gray Jays, but you'll hear things like Whiskey Jack. You know, they are well-known camp robbers. They will come in looking for handouts and especially around this Boy Scout camp there. They must have been fed for decades up there. And so anytime they hear humans around, they'll tend to come in and look for handouts. And so even if you're not giving them anything, they're incredibly curious and will just come down and kind of investigate what's going on. One of the big things I was looking for was, as I've mentioned with the Atlas, confirmed breeding. And so it was fun to see with this adult, they're actually, I think, had three adults and four juveniles. So nice to see these very young Canada Jays. They have this very dark plumage, very pale bills. And then this prominent gate line right at the corner of the mouth and just constantly begging the adults for food, following them all over. I actually, I like the juveniles a little more than the adults, but I spent probably half an hour just watching this little family group going around foraging. They'll even respond if you just whistle a little bit. You know, trying to imitate some of the noises they'll make, they'll fly right in. Again, probably expecting handouts. I wouldn't, I don't like to encourage feeding wild animals so much, but you know, from a bird feeding standpoint, it's not the worst species though. Hey Doug, I'm jumping in real quick just to say that it's 9.55. And so if you wanna try to wrap up soon and try to give a few minutes for questions, that would be great. So I'll just last mention, you know, this was a fun pond to go out exploring. Just hiked out to this, it's right off the Boy Scout Road, kind of past the Boy Scout camp. For the sake of time, I'll voice it over myself. So, you know, right off the Boy Scout Road, there's this great, you know, all sorts of great habitat. I was a little more adventurous, especially from the antlising perspective, trying to find some other species that were around. It's little bogs like this that are fantastic for things like all-excited flycatcher. There's a short video of one, all-excited were actually all over the place up there, more than I've seen in past years. They're little, they have this wonderful little pip-pip-pip note that they give. And then I could hear it almost every spot I went to and with a little effort, they were quite easy to track down. In a second, this bird should fly down. The fun thing of this video, so all-excited flycatcher living up to their name, they are flycatchers. They're apparently also wasp-catchers. The bee, I guess I can't tell exactly what that is, but fun to see it maneuver that bee around, get it to probably get rid of the stinger before getting that nice meal down. Very long-winged, great bird. The really fun thing for me to find at that pond that I hiked out to, things like a pair of ring-neck ducks, which again, we think of as just a kind of migrant passing through Maine, but they're actually breeding across a lot of our northern part of the state. And so to kind of find, essentially be able to pull back these layers of rangelie as you go birding. And there's just, there's so much that has not been explored. There's so much to find. And I find that with just about every trip I take to rangelie, especially as I try to venture away, there's so much to see at these hotspots. And even the ones not mentioned here, Parham Stream, there's so much exploring and more to be found up there. So my hope with this talk was to introduce some of those sites, some of those birds that you're likely to find. And yeah, hopefully that left you with more answers than questions. I'm gonna stop my slides, stop screen sharing so I can... Thank you, Doug. Heck yeah. Thank you. That was great. So if you guys have questions for Doug, please ask away in the chat, please. While Peter, if you could start sharing your screen, so you're ready to go in just a minute. That would be great. So any questions for Doug? And I wanna say too, as a birder, I start salivating like Pavla's dogs when I see these photos. Birding up in rangelie is so fantastic. And one of the reasons at the Rangelie Birding Festival is so great is because unlike most any other festivals, these are breeding warblers. A lot of the other festivals are celebrating migratory warblers, which is great. But those are birds sort of passing over on their way to somewhere else. That somewhere else is rangelie among other places. And so the really great thing about birding in rangelie for this festival is that you're seeing warblers not just passing through, but setting up their homes, building nests, having laying eggs, and making a home. So it's a really unique festival. And I hope again you can join us next year in person. Any other questions for Doug? Let me show you these birds myself. I know right where to find that morning warbler. Which I haven't seen yet. Yeah, just rubbing that in for you.