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BAR HARBOR – Michael Good talks to the birds, and they talk back.
The naturalist and founder of the Warblers & Wildflowers Festival, now in its eighth year, has an eye for wildlife and a hope for the future of Maine as an ecotourism center. The festival should bring scores of bird-watchers to Mount Desert Island to welcome back some of Maine’s migratory bird species from their winter in South and Central America. Promoters hope it will be a successful kickoff to MDI’s busy summer season.
But on a recent rainy day, Good was all about the birds. He shared his excitement that some early birds already have made the long flight back to his rural, wooded backyard, and paused in a tour of its marshy trails to cock an ear at a piercing whistle that fluttered somewhere high above him.
“Oh here, somebody’s coming in,” he said with satisfaction and scanned the tallest trees for a speck of color. “That’s the black-throated green warbler.”
Good lifted his head and whistled a rendition of the bird’s distinctive call, “Zee zee zee, zoo zee.” For a moment, the yard filled with anticipation and silence. Then, from above, a responding bird trilled in the damp May air.
The birds are back, and that’s a good thing.
They came back last year, too, despite the buckets of rain and gusty winds that turned tame early morning bird walks into high adventure. Birders identified 18 different species of warblers, 124 species of birds overall and counted more than 6,500 individuals.
“We have always had incredible luck, and incredible experiences,” Good said. “That’s what people take away … somebody will see a peregrine falcon take a bird off the water, or a bald eagle that goes into a dive.”
This year’s birders will learn about natural wildlife habitats, vernal pools and land use, along with bird-watching. The combination of learning about and experiencing nature is an important part of the burgeoning field of ecotourism, according to Good.
“It ties issues together,” he said of ecotourism. “Economy, ecology, community.”
Mount Desert Island and the Gulf of Maine are “amazing” places, he said. Some of the brightly colored warblers fly more than 3,000 miles up the East Coast flyway to get here, starting in Cuba, other Caribbean islands and South America.
“It’s a real splash of color,” he said of the returning birds. “A lot of yellows and rainforest-type greens.”
They come back despite continuing struggles with pesticide and herbicide use in their home habitats, including use of herbicides in some of Maine’s blueberry barrens.
“We’ve lost birds like whippoorwills,” Good said. “That’s happened in South America as well.”
He hopes that the educational component that’s part of the five-day festival will help spread the word about the dangers facing the birds, other wildlife species, and by extension, humans.
“This is about fun, it’s about getting out and walking in nature, but it’s also very serious,” he said. “We have to learn how to live together, obviously, because humans are having such a big effect on the world.”
Festival events
Festival highlights include bird walks at Schooner Head, Otter Cliffs and Sieur de Monts Spring, lectures, garden walks at the Asticou Azalea Garden, the Thuya Gardens and the Mira Monte Inn gardens, bird art, a talk on peregrine falcons at Acadia National Park, a kayaking bird tour, a “bird-themed” movie at the Criterion and a Cadillac Mountain sunset walk.
There is a cost per event. Call the Bar Harbor Chamber of Commerce for information and registration at (888) 369-8413 or visit the Web site www.barharborinfo.com/warblers.
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