Local birding report

After a long easterly winter storm—when the dark blue seas are still heaving and the wind swings briskly into the northeast—you may find the hardy Razorbill riding calmly just off our storm-beaten rocky headlands. Staunch and sea-tough, Razorbills spend most of their lives far offshore, visiting our coastline irregularly in winter. Yet when they do appear, they seem perfectly at home in the churn.

Often called the Sea Crow or Ice Bird, the Razorbill swims lightly and swiftly, its head sometimes raised but more often tucked in, its tail cocked jauntily upward. In flight it holds its head close to the body, unlike a loon which stretches its neck forward and tips slightly from side to side, flashing its white breast and black back in alternating strokes. Adults in winter show more white around the face and throat, while the species’ signature feature remains the knife-like, cross-grooved upper bill that gives the bird its name.

Like other members of the auk family, Razorbills “fly” underwater, beating their wings in powerful strokes as they dive. Once more abundant in Maine, they are slowly rebounding after decades of decline. Their behavior is as striking as their appearance: the mother carries her chick by the back of the neck from the rocky nesting crevice down to the sea. To teach it to dive, she repeatedly dunks the youngster until it finally plunges beneath the surface on its own—its first swimming lesson delivered with maternal insistence.

In winter Razorbills forage mostly over waters 130 feet deep or less, typically above sandy bottoms. Their hoarse, guttural calls carry low over the waves. Although not currently considered at high conservation risk, the species has endured a long history of exploitation. For centuries, people harvested adults, eggs and young for food, greatly reducing populations. Legal hunting of a relative (Common Murre) in Canada still results in the incidental killing of thousands of Razorbills each year, and tens of thousands are hunted annually in Iceland. Additional threats include entanglement in fishing gear, pesticide exposure, oil spills and the shifting distribution of prey caused by warming oceans.

Also appearing with some regularity off our shoreline over the last several weeks at Fort Williams, Dyer Point and Kettle Cove is the smallest of our Arctic waterfowl visitors, the Dovekie. One of the most abundant seabirds in the Northern Hemisphere, the Dovekie lives so far north that relatively few birders ever see one close to home.

Barely larger than a robin, this “Little Auk” or “little Ice-Bird” is instantly recognizable: glossy bluish-black above, white below and shaped almost like a football in flight. Its rapid, insect-like wingbeats give it a distinctive, buzzing motion over the waves. Old fishermen called them “Knotties,” praising their toughness, “as hard as a pine knot.”

For the Inuit, the Dovekie has long been a bird of salvation. Its spring return signals not only the end of the long Arctic winter but often the transition from scarcity to abundance. Families capture the birds for food, cache them in the ground for later use and sew their skins into warm birdskin shirts. Their eggs, too, are a welcome spring resource.

No discussion of auks along the Maine coast is complete without acknowledging the Great Auk, the Razorbill’s larger, flightless cousin, now extinct.

The last known Great Auks in the North Atlantic survived in the British Isles until 1834, while Canadian sightings suggest disappearance by 1800. In Maine, only a single late-17th-century eyewitness account exists, from present-day Black Point in Scarborough. Archaeological evidence shows that Native Americans occasionally harvested Great Auks when they appeared near shore, but this use was limited and sustainable. Genetic and archaeological studies indicate the species was not in long-term decline prior to intensified European exploitation.

Great Auks were imposing birds, weighing up to eleven pounds and insulated by thick layers of fat for life in cold northern waters. Outside the breeding season, they were regular visitors to the Maine coast. Their size and inability to fly made them tragically easy prey. Beginning in the 16th century, sailors and commercial hunters slaughtered them by the thousands for food, bait, fat and feathers. Entire colonies were wiped out with ruthless efficiency.

The final blow came in 1844, when the last two known Great Auks were killed in Iceland for a private collector, an abrupt end to a species that had once been abundant across the North Atlantic, Maine included.