Second Birdathon try more successful Better-organized effort finds 92 birds

It might not have been a do-or-die, 24-hour effort, but our participation in this year’s Birdathon was a success and surpassed our expectations.

Last year we did the fund-raising event without planning it or driving any distances and got 53 species for our list. This year we approached it more seriously. We solicited heavily for sponsorship and planned out our routes and destinations. The result raised $500 and put 92 species of birds on our list.

We began the day by canvassing our neighborhood, looking for birds we expected to find in certain places. Many of the birds were givens: house finch, European house sparrow, grackle, rock dove (yes, even those count). However – true to the nature of wild animals – some of them just didn’t appear when or where we thought they should.

Because we intended to count as many species as possible in one day, we couldn’t linger very long in one place hoping for the delinquent birds to show. So, even though we had seen birds like the white-breasted nuthatch dozens of times, we could not add it to our list that day.

Some unexpected additions more than made up for these losses. A serendipitous call that very morning from Fields Pond Nature Center director Judy Markowsky added a surprise bird to our list: clay-colored sparrow. Markowsky hadn’t known we had chosen that day to do the Bird-athon, and had just called to pass on the news that it was in the area.

The clay-colored sparrow is primarily a bird of the northern prairies of the United States and Canada, but has been extending its range east and north over the last several years. There have been a few scattered reports of it here in Maine.

We hardly dared hope we would actually see it. Yet, there it was, singing its heart out in a blossoming fruit tree in Orono. Actually, it was less a song than an insect-like trilling, a three- to four-note “brzzting” sound that no one would associate with a bird. We wondered if a mate would ever show up, because records of the bird in this state are scarce. Perhaps it was the only one of its kind for miles around.

We couldn’t stay to observe the bird, much as we wanted to. It was time to hit the road again.

Our trip down to the coast afterward paled in comparison to what we had found early that morning in Bangor’s Penjajawoc Marsh. We identified 50 bird species in less than four hours. If we were more experienced – and had gotten there earlier – we would no doubt have found more birds in less amount of time, for more than 180 species – almost half of all species to be found in Maine – have been documented in the marsh.

All in all, it was a good day, ending – appropriately – with the addition of a barred owl and a woodcock to our list after sundown.

Chris Corio, a volunteer at Fields Pond Nature Center in Holden, can be reached at fieldspond@juno.com