The wings we view for love ATTRACTING EXPERTS AND AMATEURS ALIKE, AUDUBON’S ANNUAL CHRISTMAS BIRD COUNT RELIES ON ENTHUSIAM ON THE FLY

ROCKLAND – Ron Joseph set off running across the golf course at the Samoset Resort, in hot pursuit of a tiny brown bird. It was 9:30 on an unseasonably warm Saturday morning in December – 40 degrees and gloriously sunny, with a slight breeze coming off the bay. Joseph kept his course.

“I’ve never seen him run that fast,” said Kristen Lindquist, a Camden resident and one of the six bird-watchers gathered that day along the beach. She called after him, “What is it, Ron?”

Joseph, who lives in Orono and works for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, came jogging back and stopped in front of the group. “It’s a swamp sparrow!” he announced.

“A swamp sparrow? No way!” exclaimed Lindquist. “We’ve never had one of those. Not this time of year, anyway.” Lindquist excitedly jotted down the information on a yellow tally sheet.

Each year between Dec. 14 and Jan. 5, birders from all over the United States participate in the National Audubon Society’s Christmas Bird Count. The Rockland-Thomaston count, one of 32 in Maine, started at 7:30 a.m. Dec. 16. By 10 a.m. the group had counted more than 25 species, including guillemots, surf scoters, cormorants and one bald eagle. By 5 p.m. the final total was 77, with the consensus being that the orange-crowned warbler, which the Rockland CBC had never seen in the past, was the most unusual of the day.

“[It’s] a rare bird to see in Maine any time of year,” said Lindquist, who works for Coastal Mountain Land Trust in Camden.

Birds spotted ranged from the everyday black-backed gull and common crow to more exotic plovers, pipits, goshawks and kittiwakes. A spontaneous sprint to catch up with a lightning-fast bird, say the swamp sparrow usually found wintering in more southern climes, is par for the course.

“That’s birding – you go off chasing after a brown speck,” said Lindquist. “It’s kind of nerdy, but it’s so fun.”

The Christmas Bird Count, now in its 107th year, has been a holiday event for both Lindquist and Joseph for more than a decade. The National Audubon Society created the counts in 1900 as an alternative to then-popular Christmas hunts. Count birds, don’t shoot them was the idea. These days conservationists consider the census a valuable tool for providing data on the winter ranges of birds and on the approximate populations in areas in North America, as well as Central America. After all the counts are completed on Jan. 5, the Audubon Society will compile the data and release it to the public.

“Obviously, this is not exact. This is more about tracking general trends,” said Lindquist. “If suddenly you’re seeing a bird during the winter that’s supposed to be gone by the fall, or a bird that was always there is now gone, we’ll have that information.”

The first stop for the birders was a walk out to the end of the breakwater, a milelong granite structure protecting Rockland Harbor. A colony of common eiders muttered and grunted as they bobbed on the water, while overhead a few Bonaparte’s gulls careened against the brisk December wind. Two black birds began making a racket, causing the group to grab binoculars and see what was causing the noise.

“Those are long-tailed ducks,” pointed out Brian Willson, a Rockport resident and one of the counters, who that morning sported a Santa hat. He imitated their calls. “Uh-uh, uh-uh, uh-HUH! They sound like a bunch of old women sitting around gabbing.”

The counters were especially keen to find the purple sandpipers that populate the harbor. The little birds, with their purple-gray plumage, are quiet and approachable. They spend their summers in the Arctic and their winters along the coast of New England and the Maritimes.

“[The purple sandpipers] are one of the exciting things. We are one of the few places in Maine that has them,” said Lindquist. “A lot of birds are staying later, though. Two years ago we saw semipalmated plovers, and December is way late for them. They usually go through here during the fall.”

The group in Rockland ranged from devoted birders such as Lindquist and Rockport’s Diane Ober (also an employee of Coastal Mountain Land Trust) to relative novices such as Sarah Greene, a massage therapist who got hooked on birding last year after watching the birds that congregated outside her Winterport home.

“I just started,” said Greene. “I watched all these ducks and geese and other birds outside my house and wanted to know the names of them, and their calls and everything.”

Willson, a longtime birder and friend of Greene’s, helped her to learn the basics.

“I’ve been doing this ever since I moved here from Texas, which was over 20 years ago,” said Willson. “The change of geography from Texas to Maine was so dramatic that the first spring I was here I started chasing down every bird I could find.”

Lindquist’s husband, Paul Doiron, started bird-watching after he met his wife. That morning he scoped out the parking lots of the Samoset, looking for chickadees and cardinals.

“I wasn’t a birder before our relationship,” he said, with a laugh. “Our relationship was sort of contingent upon me becoming one.”

“We try to plan our vacations around birding,” said Lindquist. “We’ve been to Arizona, and the Florida Everglades. We go where there’s good birding. It’s low-stress, and we’ve met some wonderful people.”

The group scouted along the paved paths running through the Samoset, stopping every so often to look through Joseph’s telescopic lens. Red-breasted mergansers, with orange mohawks, dived for food and squawked at one another. Two emerald-headed mallards took flight. Later, more than 100 Canada geese settled around a pond during a pit stop on their trip south.

After the morning along the breakwater and the golf course, the group headed inland, exploring along the St. George River in Warren and Weskeag Marsh and Chickawaukie Lake in Thomaston. They spotted both lesser and greater scaups, great blue herons, a turkey vulture and a great horned owl, before heading home to make the final tally.

But it was not just the unusual species that excited the birders – even the simplest house sparrow is as much a part of the adventure as a red-tailed hawk, or a razorbill.

“I’ve become very sensitive to the birds around me,” said Willson. “I always see them wherever I go.”

“Studying nature gives you a different perspective on the world,” added Lindquist. “And not only is it an excuse to get outside, but we just love birds. They’re beautiful.”