Tuesday, September 11, 2012

New yard, new yard birds - and a lifer!

I haven't had a ton of time to go birding here in Maine, as we've been unpacking and I've been getting up to speed on my new job (same as my old job, just with different everything but the title and the duties -- but it's all different here, and I'm still waiting to get sales turf, etc.). Still, I've put up the bird feeders and we've had some good action!

So far, we have the following:
American Goldfinch
House Finch
Purple Finch
American Crow
Eastern Bluebird
Black-and-white Warbler (cool!)
Black-capped Chickadee (the state bird)
and, just the other night, BARRED OWL! Calling in the woods across the street! AB heard someone asking her "who cooks for you?" as she was arranging things in the dining room; she called me and we went outside and heard him! I did my fabulous imitation, and he responded several times! Lifer!

Not a bad haul. I've got some nice feeding stations set up, but mostly we get finches. Nothing exotic (yet), but I'm hopeful we'll get some good winter finches. I just set up some suet and a feeder under our pine outside the living room windows (where we got the Black-and-white Warbler yesterday), so I'm hoping to get some real action there.

I'm hoping to spend some time this weekend on the coast and in some of the local hotspots; we're like ten minutes from the coast, although I hesitate to call it the ocean, as we're really just near one of the fingers of water that cut into the coastline of Maine:
That arrow points to the dot showing where we live, about two miles outside of Brunswick. The circled area, Popham Beach State Park, is actually on the ocean, but I didn't even take my bins; we were just going to spend some time together walking in the sand and soaking up the late summer/early fall sun on Labor Day. The scale on this map is such that it's 26 miles from my house to Popham Beach (up and over and down).

You can see we live very near Maquoit Bay, and I'm hoping to get in some good birding there this weekend. There's also Mast Landing Bird Sanctuary about five minutes away from us.

I need to study so hard: pelagic birds can be seen from places like Popham Beach, and I wouldn't know a shearwater from a gull at this point. I've been able to avoid looking at any kind of pelagic birds for a long time in my birding life; now I've got to catch up.

Hope to have some good reports for you after the weekend.

6 comments:

RG said...

Looks like kayak country!

Fran said...

Very cool!!

Dr. Monkey Von Monkerstein said...

Congrats on the move. I hope everything is fabulous for you and your gal!

dguzman said...

Rabbits' Guy--exactly! Or at least a canoe.

Fran--Fran! You have to come visit.

Dr. Monkey--thank you -- you have to come visit too! Everyone does! Maine is beautiful!

Jen Sanford said...

Ooh sounds exciting! I grew up in New England and definitely miss the Atlantic side of things sometimes. Congrats!

dguzman said...

Jen, I've only visited the Pacific side of things, but I miss it all the time.