At this time every year I begin to get very tired of winter. It seems as if spring is just around the corner, but its coming is agonizingly slow. I was particularly delighted, then, to receive a press release from the Cobscook Bay Area Chamber of Commerce announcing the first Down East Spring Birding Festival, May 28-31. Suddenly, spring really is attainable!

I’ve never been to a birding festival, and actually won’t be able to attend this one this year – I’d already made camping reservations in Baxter. But that’s beside the point. The important thing is the event, the foresight of those who organized and are sponsoring the event, and location, location, location.

Preparatory to moving to Maine, I had made some exploratory trips to decide where to settle. My second trip took me to the Cobscook Bay area, where I stayed at a wonderful bed and breakfast on a working farm, aptly named Yellow Birch Farm, in Pembroke. I absolutely fell in love with this wild and beautiful region of Maine’s coast.

The “Sunrise Coast,” as it is called, offers spectacular views and diverse habitats for anyone to explore. The festival venue will provide both guided and self-guided bird walks. Trips into Moosehorn National Wildlife Refuge might turn up northern woodland species such as spruce grouse, gray jays, boreal chickadees, black-backed woodpeckers, plus 23 species of warblers.

Visits to Roosevelt-Campobello International Park, on Campobello Island, might produce black-billed cuckoos, yellow-bellied flycatchers, indigo buntings, and Lincoln’s sparrows, among others. Oh, and don’t forget the historic 34-room “cottage” once occupied by FDR and his family.

Perhaps the highlight of the festival are guided boat tours to Machias Seal Island, home to a large population of nesting Atlantic Puffins, which can be viewed up close from within bird blinds. Also present on the island are common murres, razorbill auks, and common and arctic terns.

Cobscook Bay State Park offers the chance to see nesting osprey and bald eagles.

Topics of interest to birders will be presented by different speakers. Speakers include Gayle Kraus, professor of Marine Ecology at the University of Maine-Machias; Mark McCollough, an endangered species biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; and Tom Hodgman, a Department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife biologist.

There are also a few art galleries in the area where birders can indulge themselves, such as “Crow Tracks,” a woodcarving gallery specializing in carving birds, and “DownEast Drawings and Wildlife Art,” which offers original and print art work.

Also taking place at the same time in the area is the 400th anniversary celebration of St. Croix Island, which is the New World’s first French settlement and the first European settlement north of St. Augustine.

Now I wish I hadn’t been so hasty in making those Baxter reservations!

For more information or to register for the festival, write: Down East Spring Birding Festival, PO Box 42, Whiting, ME 04691. Or visit the festival’s Web page at www.downeastbirdfest.org. Participation is limited to the first 100 registrants.

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