We’ve had many field trips this winter since the Christmas Bird Counts. One was led by Jerry Smith. They found some beautiful birds, such as Bohemian waxwings and pine grosbeaks, the stars of this winter.

But the highlight of that birding trip was not a bird at all. What really thrilled the 18 people on that trip was a bobcat. They got to watch it for quite a while, as it walked across the ice of Fields Pond and sniffed a muskrat house.

Another field trip focused on tracking was led by wildlife biologist Barry Burgason. A dozen people met in Old Town, put on snowshoes and headed into the woods. They followed the tracks of deer to a fallen cedar, where the deer had been nibbling on cedar foliage.

They continued on down the trail to a beaver dam and climbed over it. They snowshoed across the beaver flowage to the beaver lodge.

Barry explained that this was a recently repaired lodge, because it had new logs on it. Some people climbed to the top of the lodge and looked into the beaver’s breathing hole. They couldn’t see inside, but the breathing hole was lined with feathery-looking frost, indicating that there was indeed a family of beavers inside.

Yet another field trip, led by wildlife biologist Ron Joseph, focused on ducks of the Kennebec River, and on the big fields in Clinton, where osprey nests are visible from I-95. The ospreys won’t be there until mid-April, but those fields have interesting birds in winter, too.

In the big fields, they saw hawks – three red-tailed hawks, a sharp-shinned hawk and a Cooper’s hawk. Then a participant noticed a small, distant bird on the very top of a tall maple tree.

Ron Joseph focused his telescope on the bird, and said, “It’s a northern shrike.” Everybody got a good look at the fierce little bird, about the size of a robin, but capable of killing mice and birds.

Our leader spotted a distant flock of small birds coming our way.

“Snow buntings,” he said, when the birds were still dots in the sky. They landed close by in a patch of weeds. Everyone was delighted that these little white birds came to us. With black on the end of their wings and russet on their backs and heads, they were a beautiful sight amidst the snow and brown weeds.

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