John Wyatt is an expert birder, a birding field trip leader and a resident of Winterport. Many unusual bird species migrate down the Penobscot River and stop over in his yard. Examples in the past year have been a western tanager, a yellow-billed cuckoo, a black-billed cuckoo, several rusty blackbirds and, just last week, a Carolina wren.

These birds are insect eaters, not seed eaters. Wyatt has been “farming” mealworms for the last three months, so he can feed these unusual birds when they show up near his feeders. Mealworms are beetle larvae, available for sale at pet stores or on the Web.

And for three months, no bird found the mealworms on the feeder. But just last week, Wyatt came to the Fields Pond Audubon Center in Holden and said exuberantly, “A bird is eating the mealworms! Success at last! I hope it’s the Carolina wren. I haven’t seen the bird in action, but the number of mealworms keeps going down.”

Several days later, he came in again, disconsolate.

“I discovered what bird was eating the mealworms,” he said with a sigh. “It was a chickadee.”

Then he remembered that chickadees are inquisitive and are often the first at a feeder; other species follow. That Carolina wren may yet find those mealworms.

John Wyatt recently watched an avian drama play out on the edge of the river. A female northern harrier flew along the Winterport side of the river.

It flew downstream where a Cooper’s hawk was sitting on a rock, eating a pigeon. The alarmed Cooper’s hawk flew to a perch nearby and the larger harrier took off, carrying the pigeon.

The Cooper’s hawk followed the harrier awhile, but kept some distance back. It finally landed in a tree, having lost its meal to the bigger bird.

“An interesting bit of afternoon drama,” said the philosophical Wyatt.

For information on Fields Pond Audubon Center, call 989-2591.