Recently I was commiserating with a friend over the general lack of good birding at this time of year. He had remarked that all the good birds had gone south and all the northern irruptives hadn’t shown up yet.

I could understand his doldrums. It’s December; we’re approaching the shortest day of the year; everything is frozen and dreary, with no snow to brighten the landscape and decently bury dead vegetation. It’s dark when we wake up, and dark when we leave work. The only birds we see are the same old visitors at the feeding stations – the ubiquitous chickadees, the red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches, downy and hairy woodpeckers, and a handful of goldfinches.

But a look at Maine Audubon’s birding alert e-mails, plus postings of local birders, proves things are otherwise – at least in some locales, some of the time. At this time of the year, sometimes you have to be willing to travel to see “good” birds.

Or be very, very patient (and lucky) to have one show up in your neighborhood.

This was the case in Winterport, where a female Western Tanager made an appearance. As its name suggests, its range occupies the western United States and Canada, but there have been numerous sightings outside of its normal range; many along the East Coast.

Elsewhere in southern Maine a blue grosbeak graced a backyard bird feeder. These birds breed much farther south than New England, and winter in Central America.

Luckily for us, birds may end up far from their usual haunts during migration, enlivening many a birder’s day and dispelling winter blues.

A snowy owl and a few common redpolls constitute our northern irruptive contingent. The snowy, which was seen in Wells, is a bird of the high Arctic; it moves south of its range when lemming and vole populations crash. Although Maine is part of its winter range, the bird can be nomadic. There is no guarantee that we’ll see it here, so its appearance is always of special note.

Common redpolls are small arctic finches that are especially hardy in the cold. They normally wouldn’t winter much farther south than the U.S.-Canada border – unless seed crops fail. In this case they irrupt south of the border. In the past, this has followed a regular cycle, about every other year.

However, data from Project Feeder Watch, a Cornell Lab of Ornithology citizen science project, show this cycle has been broken. Instead of “invading” every other year, common redpolls appeared in large numbers in two consecutive years – 2003-04 and 2004-05.

According to the Cornell Web site, predictions for redpoll movements this winter call for many of the birds to remain in boreal regions, as their favorite seed crop – white birch – is reported to be fairly good.

But, who knows what will actually happen, and what rarities will show up. That’s one thing I can look forward to during the winter days ahead.

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