Local birding report

Before lawns green up, and before fields and meadows come to live, many of the first signs of spring across Cape Elizabeth can be found in our tidal and inland salt marshes, wooded swamps, bogs, wet meadows and vernal pools.

In 1990 the town adopted rigorous local wetland regulations that today serve as a model statewide for communities that value environment protection. Of the total 30% of the town that is located in a Resource Protections District, 14% is located in RP-1 district and 15% of the town is in a RP-2 district which includes wetlands of less than one acre in size with poorly drained soil and regularly occurring wetland plants.

Our future preservation efforts should consider enhanced measures to continue to protect our RP-2 wetlands from development as these natural places are birding treasure-troves and function as feeders to RP-1 districts such as the Pond Cove Brook Corridor.

My notes from the field include, on the morning of March 18 my son and I crept up on two busy Fox Sparrows. These birds (slightly bigger than bluebirds) were heard excavating for seed and insects in the leaf litter from twenty five yards away! The Fox Sparrows that pass through Cape are a rich reddish chestnut color.

Interestingly, this is one of the few of our sparrows that scratches with both feet at once. Ornithologist Edward Howe Forbush wrote of the bird, “The Fox Sparrow is a bird of the lingering snow. It arrives in New England commonly in March, while there is still much snow in the woods, and may seen along the edges of woodlands, working often in the thickets where the ground is bare, and scratching away as if for dear life.”

These retiring sparrows are common to uncommon migrants that arrive every spring for a brief period across Cape, departing for the Canadian boreal forest or the far reaches of Northwest Maine by the second week in April. Although still common, the North American Breeding Bird Survey estimates that Fox Sparrows population has declined by 51% between 1966 and 2015. A note on Woodcocks: On March 16 I flushed two birds in an RP-2 bog in my backyard. And under the dim evening light of March 21 I lost track after counting a dizzying thirty-six American Woodcocks – four along Shore Road and the remainder along the Willow Brook, Spurwink River and across Gull Crest (uplands included). Also known as the Night Partridge, this bird’s flight song is reminiscent to that of the Ovenbird, bubbly and exuberant.

On March 24 along Pond Cove my son flushed his first Great Blue Heron of the spring. On March 26 in the same vicinity, I noted a male and female Wood duck, a single Golden-crowned Kinglet and many singing Song Sparrows, Brown Creepers and White Breast Nuthatches.

Also worth mentioning, on March 27 I noticed an early Lesser Yellow Legs foraging alone along the Rachel Carson NWR stretch of Sawyer Road. This shorebird prefers the pannes on the upper sections of salt marshes. According to eBird the earliest arrival of Lesser Yellow Legs to date in Southern Maine is March 26. Later that same afternoon I spotted two Hooded Mergansers on Great Pond and four within Calvary Cemetery in South Portland.