Local birding report

Cygnus the Swan constellation of stars flies high along the Milky Way in August and somewhere between the treetops and the cloud bottoms a buzzy tseep call drips down out of the darkness to call my attention to the fact that fall migration for some songbirds has already begun.

Throughout August the dreamy tune of Eastern Wood Peewees can still be heard among treetops deep within our woodlands. While flycatchers are not considered songbirds, this dusky haunter of tall shady trees sings a song of three sliding notes that is simple and true. If you find yourself in the woods around sundown listen for their whistled twilight song.

How fortunate I consider myself to see Bald Eagles with such clarity and regularity across Cape Elizabeth. In late July while traversing the sunny upland pastures of Richmond Island I spotted a single eagle heading towards the mainland and in early August just after sunset I came across a single adult perched high up in an old snag along the Pond Cove Brook Corridor section of Robinson Woods III. I happened upon a third, younger eagle while gazing out a skylight on my porch. Naturalist Henry David Thoreau once wrote this enriching passage in his Journal I: 1837-1846 “we who live this plodding life here below never know how many eagles fly over us. They are concealed in the empyrean.”

In the spring of 1854 Thoreau travelled on foot from Concord to Boston to purchase a telescope for bird viewing. Thoreau later noted in his journal that, “I bought me a spy-glass some weeks since. I buy but few things and those not till long after I begin to want them, so that when I do get them, I am prepared to make perfect use of them and extract their whole sweet.” About two weeks later Thoreau captured his first encounter viewing a Bald Eagle with his telescope. “Saw my white-headed eagle again...Lying on the ground with my glass, I would watch him very easily, and by turns he gave me all possible views of himself” and later, “He rose very high at last, till I almost lost him in the clouds, circling or rather looping along the westward, high over the river and wood and farm, effectually concealed in the sky.” Thoreau went on to say, “I think I have got the worth of my glass now that it has revealed to me the white-headed eagle. Now I see him edgewise like a black ripple in the air, his white head still as ever turned to earth, and now he turns under side to me and I behold the full breadth of his broad black wings, somewhat ragged at the edges”

A few other mentionables from the yard and field over the last several weeks include – On the evening of August 1 I was beckoned to the dark fringes of my property to listen to the rasping, hissing noises coming from three almost adult sized Barred Owls. Additionally on August 4 I noted hearing three different Buteo’s, a Red-tailed Hawk, a Broad-winged Hawk and a Red-shouldered Hawk respectively. Distinguishing the vocal differences between these three Birds of Prey requires minimal effort. The Red-tailed Hawk’s raspy scream is often used in movies to represent hawks, eagles and just about any bird of prey, The Broad-winged Hawk’s call is a two-part, high, thin pitched whistle that sound like “peeweee” and is almost always heard coming from somewhere high in the sky. The Red-shouldered Hawk calls both when perched and while in flight. The noise is a loud, repeated “kee-aah” that can often be heard from miles away.

Additionally, on the morning of August 10 along the Sawyer Road stretch of the Spurwink River I noted five Great Egrets, seven Snowy Egrets and one Little Blue Heron. Never particularly common, these elegant little herons appear during the hot days of August. The Little Blue is similar in stature to that of a Snowy Egret but has a dark slaty-blue body and eggplant colored head and neck that appear to glow under the right lighting. The first confirmed breeding in Maine of a Little Blue Heron was not until 1971 and yearly surveys taken on Stratton Island report having no more than three pairs breeding in most years.