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Jeff and Allison Wells Wed, 01/27/2021 - 8:30am Amazingly, a pine siskin was recently heard flying over Everglades National Park. At the same time, the species was reported far to the north, in the tiny community of Moosonee, on the shore of James Bay in northern Ontario. Courtesy of Jeff Wells. Redpolls are one of the irruptive finches sought after by birders across the eastern U.S. Courtesy of Jeff Wells. Many of you may have been fortunate enough to have at your feeders in the late fall and early winter any number of special winter visitors: irruptive finches or other birds whose breeding range extends across the vast Boreal Forest. In our neighborhood we were blessed with a large flock of pine siskins that spent weeks feeding in the tall northern white cedar on the edge of our neighbor’s driveway. We saw quite a large flock of common redpolls at the end of October over at the Viles Arboretum in Augusta. Mom Wells hosted some bright yellow evening grosbeaks at her Damariscotta feeder earlier in the fall, and our cousin’s husband photographed a migrating purple finch that landed on his boat 12 miles out to sea. And red-breasted nuthatches seem to be everywhere; they began to be detected in odd places as early as August as they started moving south in numbers.
Jeff and Allison Wells Wed, 12/23/2020 - 8:15am For the authors, a highlight of the 121st annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count was close observations of pine grosbeaks, an unusual winter visitor from Canadian Boreal Forest. Courtesy of Jeff Wells The day started with the temperature in the single digits. It was the day of the 121 st annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count (CBC). The CBCs take place in the period spanning from mid-December through early January. The count was started as a sort of protest to a practice known as the Christmas hunt, when hunters would go out around the holidays and see how many birds (and presumably other creatures as well) they could shoot. Frank Chapman--a prominent ornithologist, conservationist, and writer/editor who published an early wildlife conservation magazine—invited his readers in 1900 to begin a tradition of counting rather than hunting birds around the holiday season. Twenty-seven people participated in 25 counts that first year.