A personal-blog journal on the birds of the Maine coast east of Penobscot Bay — Hancock County, Washington County, the Bold Coast, the offshore islands. Five seasonal entries from one observer with one pair of binoculars and one quiet morning a week.
Each entry covers one of the five seasons that an attentive Maine birder actually keeps — the deep winter, the false spring, the migration weeks, the breeding summer, the long fall. The entries are personal, not academic; the data is in the eBird account, not here.
The deep winter on the Stonington shore is the quietest birding I know. The summer birds are gone, the migrants have long passed, and what remains is the resident core — the loons in the harbour, the eiders on the ledges, the harlequins under the lighthouse, the snow buntings on the cobble beach behind the post office.
Read the field report →
The false spring on the coast of Maine is the week or two of unseasonably warm weather in late March that produces a small first wave of migrants and then collapses into a final cold snap. It is, every year, the most exciting week of the birding calendar and the most disappointing.
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The true spring migration reaches the Maine coast in the second and third weeks of May. The Bold Coast — the long granite cliff-line between Cutler and Lubec — is the easternmost continental land in the United States, and it is where many of the trans-Atlantic and Maritime migrants make first landfall.
Read the field report →
The breeding season on the offshore islands of eastern Maine is the high point of the birding year. The islands hold the principal Atlantic puffin and Arctic tern colonies of the United States outside of Alaska, and the breeding-season visit — on the small ferry from Stonington, with a quiet binocular — is one of the great birding experiences of the eastern seaboard.
Read the field report →
The fall on the Maine coast is, for a serious birder, the season of the seawatch — the long morning vigil at a coastal headland during the southbound seabird migration. The Schoodic Point seawatch in late September and early October produces some of the most concentrated seabird viewing on the North American Atlantic.
Read the field report →
Retired high-school biology teacher, Deer Isle. Has kept a personal birding log for the Maine coast east of Penobscot Bay since 1991. The journal is the open half of that log. More on the project →