Last weekend I took some time to visit a local birding hotspot that I had never visited.

Taylor Road, located off Forest Avenue in Orono, is a great place to go during migration. Otherwise known as the old dump road, it gives up spectacular treasures for those who seek them. That’s partly because there are old bait ponds to the right of the road; these are on land privately owned, but wildlife in the ponds can be enjoyed and observed without ever leaving your car, if you wish. Sometimes, staying in your vehicle is the best choice – you can use it as a “blind,” preventing birds from startling if you emerge.

Farther down the road is the Orono Land Trust’s Newman Hill Preserve, which contains a small foot trail open to the public. I stayed on the road because I had fine views of an immature great blue heron fishing in one of the ponds.

The day was perfect. The noon-day sun – so brutal in early summer – brought welcome warmth on this cool, late summer day. The young heron’s gray plumage seemed to assume the blue of the sky, gorgeously contrasting with the chocolate-brown pond water and the deep green of sedge grasses.

The heron was a perfect study in precision and patience. It waded so slowly with movements so controlled it hardly seemed that it moved at all. But it was alive with intense concentration as it focused on the water beneath it. Suddenly, it froze, then thrust its beak beneath the surface with lightening speed. More often than not, it came back with tiny wriggling fish that were swallowed in one gulp.

Hooded mergansers – juveniles, I thought – dove and preened, and a double-crested cormorant caught my attention as it spread its wings, flapping them lazily to dry them. My binoculars picked up a flurry of movement at the far end of the pond, which contained small mud patches. I realized there were at least two types of sandpipers foraging out there.

One, larger than the rest, poked around the mud flat, probing for its prey of invertebrates. It was dark above, with a white belly and undertail. I was too far away to note any other characteristics, such as the color of its legs, which can sometimes clinch identification. I thought it could be a solitary sandpiper – these birds’ legs are greenish in color.

The other shorebirds were so tiny I couldn’t discern them unless they moved, which, luckily, they did often. If they weren’t skittering along together searching for food, they were suddenly wheeling into flight as one. But what were they? I hadn’t a clue.

There is a group of small sandpipers that are sometimes simply called “peeps” because of the difficulty in identifying them. They are similar in appearance, and it takes an experienced birder to note subtle details in plumage patterns and bill shape to differentiate among them. I knew least sandpipers had recently been spotted at the ponds, so this was a possibility.

These and most other sandpipers breed in northern Canada and the high Arctic, migrating thousands of miles to their “winter” homes in South America. I marveled at this journey and felt humbled – my trials and tribulations appearing small compared to their monumental challenge – and was glad I got to see them on one small leg of their travels. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t identify them exactly; that will come in time.

I hope they’ll be back.

For a list of Bangor-area birding hotspots, go to: http://www.pvcaudubon.org/hotspots.htm.

NEWS bird columnist Chris Corio can be reached at bdnsports@bangordailynews.net