Local birding report

On the coldest day of February I went searching for Snow Buntings, Horned Larks and elusive Lapland Longspurs. Far from the treeless artic habitats from which these ground dwellers call home, all three “open-country” species can be found in Cape during the winter months but are incredibly easy to overlook as they forage for grass and flowering-plant seeds in open fields, shorelines, roadsides, and plowed croplands. Although I did not find any artic wanderers that day, I did spot an adult Bald Eagle soaring along Crescent Beach State Park and a single Common Raven headed out to hunker down on Richmond Island for the night.

Additional notes from the last two weeks include: on February 5 while walking along Jordan Farm Road I heard a Great-horned Owl calling briefly from somewhere within the evergreen forest along Hannaford Cove Road. The owl’s call was more of a soft cooing sound, quite similar to that of a Mourning Dove.

On this same day within Kettle Cove a solitary Northern Mockingbird was guarding his Winterberry throne and as the sun was setting I spotted six Brants foraging on the falling tide for eelgrass and aquatic vegetation. These handsome mid-sized, short-legged geese are long distance migrants down from their breeding grounds in the central Canadian artic. This small flocks guttural crrronk and ruk-ruk calls caught my ear and for a moment my mind wandered to a wilder place far from here. No other goose breeds further north than the Brant.

Also, on February 11 I caught sight of two male Northern Flickers in my backyard engaged in a ritualized dance display which included bill “fencing,” loud “wicka wicka” calls and flicking and flashing of wings and tails which exposed their exquisite yellow flight feathers. I also recently learned that the northern flicker has an oversized tongue that can extent up to two inches past the tip of the bird’s beak. Later on that day I spotted my first Common Grackle of the season perched atop a Maple tree in Gull Crest.

The following day in Two Lights State Park I came across a Hermit Thrush in one of the denser thicket areas and observed three Harlequin Ducks working the rough water along the rocky coastline. Just offshore I spied several Buffleheads, a Horned Grebe and a deep diving Black Guillemot. Red-breasted Nuthatches, Golden-crowned Kinglets and Brown Creepers were abundant in the park’s forested sections.

In other related news, a bird that has been lost to science since 1882 was recently rediscovered by the Search for Lost Birds expedition team on Fergusson Island within the Papua New Guinea archipelagos. The team spent a month searching for the bird on an extremely rugged and densely covered geothermal island. The team leveraged indigenous hunters’ historic knowledge of the bird and also deployed camera traps. On the second to last day before scientists were scheduled to depart the island, a Black-naped Pheasant Pigeon was caught on one of the remote cameras walking around and fanning its tail. As this bird has significant cultural importance to the indigenous peoples of the island, their discovery of it was very important. Scientists plan to return to the island to try to better understand how many Pheasant Pigeons still exist and what role this bird plays in the island’s ecosystem.

Speaking of pheasants, growing up in New England I fondly recall hearing the rooster like crowing of Ringed-neck Pheasants at dusk. According to Peter Vickery’s Birds of Maine, the first pheasants likely appeared in southern Maine in the late 1800s from release sites in Massachusetts. Native to East Asia, this species was first introduced into the state in 1930 by Maine Department of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife and have not been able to establish breeding populations in Maine due to the increase pressures of predation, scarcity of standing grain crops for winter foraging and winter cold and snow cover. Ring-necked Pheasants prefer agricultural fields and early succession forests or “open woods.” Vickery goes on to say that “areas with sustained populations of Ring-necked Pheasants tend to be offshore islands with limited terrestrial predators and repeated stocking efforts such as on Monhegan Island.” In 2022 there were thirteen sites across Maine stocked with Pheasants for hunting, the closest locations being in Scarborough and Gorham. Each site receives about thirty pheasants, and they stock these sites several times each in the early fall. In 2021 there were three more sites that have since been removed from the state list due to land acquisition and subsequent development.