We’re on Day Three of four days in a row of incredibly hot weather for Maine. At this time of year the normal high we’re used to is 75. Today it will be 90 and the air quality will be bad because the air is moving up from PA, NYC, and the east coast. It’s too hot to hike.
Some of you asked if Hurricane Earl will affect us. Yes, but my husband and I are looking forward to the rain & cooler temperatures. We might regret that attitude at dawn on Saturday when Earl will have been here for 6 hours, but for now Earl is welcome to arrive ASAP!
Todd Katzner is on a field expedition in Mongolia and emailed me this picture yesterday, a sample of the stunning raptors he’s seeing there.
A lot of my scientist friends do field work in the summer, something I’ve never done. To get a sense of what their trips are like I’ve been reading Tingay & Katzner’s The Eagle Watchers.
Ghostly New Guinea harpy eagles, wary and comical Steller’s sea eagles.
The birds they see on field expeditions are out of this world.
The cool thing about going to Maine is that I get to see birds I would never see at home. This northern gannet is a perfect example. There’s no way this huge sea bird with a six and a half foot wingspan would be found taking a nose dive in the Monongahela River. He needs deep saltwater for his livelihood.
I’ve seen northern gannets from the shores of Virginia and Florida in the winter but they’re far away and look like tiny arrowheads. To get a closeup like this and to see a host of birds who never come near shore, I have to travel far off the coast on a pelagic tour.
Maine Audubon has an annual pelagic tour in October that goes 40 miles off the coast of Bar Harbor, but I’ll be in Pittsburgh then. What to do? A Maine birder gave me a tip: You can see pelagic birds on the Whale Watch. The goals of these two boat trips are different but the whale watch looks for whales up to 20 miles offshore and pelagic birds are often in the vicinity of whales because both are looking for food-filled patches of ocean. He also said that if you can pick any day to make the trip, go when the wind is light – otherwise the wave action hides the loafing birds.
So I went on the whale watch Wednesday morning when the waves were less than a foot high. The weather was great and I met another birder, Andy Block, who leads birding tours to Costa Rica for Tico Tours. For a landlubber like me sea birds are often confusing so I was really glad Andy was there to tell me what they were:
Waves crashing at Acadia National Park (a grainy photo by Kate St. John)
September 2, 2009
This is no news to people who live by the sea but to those who are landlocked or work indoors the ocean looks powerful but benign when you’re standing on high ground.
Though it’s been 10 days since it happened, all the talk among the tourists at Acadia National Park is about the killer wave from Hurricane Bill on August 23, 2009 which swept over spectators near Thunder Hole, injuring more than a dozen people, dragging three into the sea and killing one of them, a seven-year-old girl.
My grainy photo above doesn’t show the horror of that moment. Paul Colby of Belfast, Maine was there and captured the aftermath of the wave with people crouching and trying to get back to dry land. More spectators had been sitting on the rocks where the foam was churning, but they’re gone. Click here for Paul’s photo and here for the article in the Bangor Daily News.
Tropical Storm Danny was threatening the coast with similar weather when we arrived in New England on Saturday. We spent a very wet, windy, gray day in New Hampshire and have had beautiful weather ever since. We’ve had no desire to look at waves. We hear they’re only 1-2 feet high today. Good!
Hello from Maine. We’re at Acadia National Park as usual at this time of year.
I’m hoping to see some new birds and new places. Will it be a good year for a warbler “fallout?” Will the crossbills be at Acadia this fall? What new sea birds will I see on the Whale Watch? Will I finally see a moose? (Can you believe I’ve never seen one in 26 years of going to Maine?)
We plan to hike some new trails and visit some new-to-us towns. I’ll still be blogging while I’m here but less frequently. After all, it’s a vacation!
Today is the Summer Solstice, the day when the sun’s rays reach the furthest north and the sun shines its longest throughout the northern hemisphere. Here in Pittsburgh we’ll have 15 hours and 4 minutes of sunlight. For my friends in Finland, the sun will be above the horizon for 19 hours with bright twilight for the remaining five. It’s a happy day in Finland.
Musings about the sun and thoughts about birds combined in my head into “sunbird.”
Did you know there’s a family of birds called sunbirds, Nectariniidae, who live in Africa, southern Asia and northern Australia? The one pictured here is a male Regal Sunbird, Nectarinia regia, native of central equatorial Africa.
Sunbirds have a lifestyle similar to our hummingbirds because they feed primarily on nectar. Though the two families are unrelated they’re an example of convergent evolution: their needs are so similar that they’re equipped with the same tools.
Like hummingbirds, sunbirds they have short wings and fly fast. Some even hover, though most species perch as seen here. They have long bills for collecting nectar but will also collect insects to feed their young. The males are brilliantly colored, often in metallic hues. And like our hummingbirds, sunbirds who live where it’s cold at night are capable of entering torpor.
Except for his curved bill and long tail this sunbird looks a lot like a hummingbird. Unlike our hummingbirds his equatorial range means he’ll never experience summer’s longest day.
For more about summer and our longest day, see Chuck Tague’s blog. For more about sunbirds, click here.
This weekend I’ve rolled the dice and driven five hours to Kleinfeltersville, PA hoping to see the same thing. On Friday the snow goose count was only 25,000 but the numbers change every day in early March. There’s been a south wind, and I’m hoping there’ll be a lot of birds when I get there.
A flock of 100,000 birds of any kind is exciting and with snow geese it’s truly exhilarating. I always arrive before dawn, walk to Willow Point and wait. The geese murmur in the dark. Slowly the sun rises and the birds prepare to leave. If I’m lucky, a bald eagle will fly by and the geese will rise up all at once.
That must have been the situation when Kim took this picture. The geese on the ground are craning their necks, looking worried. The rest are jumping into the sky. It’s a wonder that amidst all the flapping and honking they don’t knock each other out – but they don’t.
I love to watch the chaos and patterns of snow geese. I just have to be lucky with my timing and be there when they are.
For as many times as I’d been to Florida I’d never seen a sandwich tern. They may have flown by me in years past, but fast-moving gulls and terns are hard for me to identify. I just don’t see them often enough to be good at it. Pittsburgh is sorely lacking an oceanfront.
Last year Chuck Tague gave me a good tip on identifying terns and I wrote it in my field guide: Look at the bills and legs. What color and shape is the bill? What color are the legs?
Caspian terns are easy. They’re big and stocky and their bills look like fat carrots attached to their faces.
I now see that sandwich terns are easy too. They’re the only “crested” tern with a black bill, and it’s a very fancy one – all black with a yellow tip. This color combination is quite unique. Plenty of birds have black-tipped yellow bills but in searching my field guide I can find only one other bird with a yellow-tipped black bill: the Sabine’s gull. I wonder why.
Another puzzle was their name. Why are they called “sandwich” terns? Isn’t Sandwich in England?
Again, my land-lubber roots were showing. If I lived near the ocean I’d know that seabirds can easily occur worldwide because they find food everywhere there’s salt water – and so it is with sandwich terns. They nest on the coasts of Europe, North and South America, and winter on the coasts of the Americas, the Mediterranean, Africa, India and the Middle East. Birds born here are sometimes found in the Netherlands and U.K. in winter – and vice versa.
This also explains their name, given to them by John Latham in 1787 from a specimen found at Sandwich Bay, Kent, England. Back then they bred there. Interestingly, their Latin name recently changed from Sterna sandvicensis to Thalasseus sandvicensis after DNA tests put them in a different genus. The “sandwich” part remains the same.
At Ponce Inlet I had a good long look at the terns as they stood in a mixed flock facing the wind only 12 feet away. I could easily see how different they were from Forster’s terns. (Click on the photo to see for yourself – a Forster’s tern standing between two sandwich terns.)
And finally, you can tell I’ve been birding with pun-master Chuck Tague for six days because I started this blog with an “almost” pun. I veered away from it just in time.
As I had hoped, Chuck & Joan Tague helped me find a Florida scrub-jay at Merritt Island last week. Er, rather… the scrub-jay found me.