July 17-20: The Lowdown Downeast

It crept up on me this year. One early, snowy morning I was owling, and then BAM! Time to go see puffins in Maine.

We don't go directly to Machias Seal Island from the South Shore and Ipswich River Sanctuaries. Instead, we wander: through Bangor, have lunch at the Sea Dog, fly up the Airline and through the Deblois blueberry barrens. The first day is broken up well, as we stop here and there to seek a bird or two. The barrens this year were not quite barren. No upland sandpipers, but then, I haven't seen them there in any of the three years I've done this trip. Maybe it's me. We did score a vesper sparrow, three American bitterns, lots of ravens and a pair of turkeys in a distant tree. Even the eastern bluebirds were nice, adding to the indigo bunting we saw on the way up. Blueberries, bluebirds, blue jays, blue was the color of the day.

It wouldn't end up that way, though. We hit the Machias Motor Inn, our old familiar haunt. I walked out back with a scope and found our reliable American bald eagle, perched in a tree a ways down the Machias River, down from the "Bad Little Falls" that gives the town its name. We then went to Helen's for dinner and blueberry pie, but they were out! How could this be? You can't go to Helen's and not try the blueberry pie. But there we were, and there it wasn't. We voted to go without dessert, all fourteen of us, and to order three pies for the next evening's meal. The lobster, the scallops, the...well, everything was worth the wait.

At dinner, though, we compared notes with a group birding from the Carolinas. They were headed well north to find spruce grouses and boreal chickadees, and had not been able to land on Machias Seal Island. In fact, it had been a week since anyone had set foot on the island, due to the remnants of Hurricane Bertha. This was not good news for Carol Decker (the trip leader) and me. This happened last year. Circling the island is nice, but standing just a few feet from puffins is a different experience altogether.

Well, we had a day to wait anyway. We started birding early in the morning of the 18th, taking the East Side Road down to its lowest point. Warblers to the right, shorebirds to the left. Semipalmated sandpipers and plovers fed on the mudflats as the tide rose, while Swainson's thrushes called in the background. Up and down the roadside the smaller birds played: blue-headed vireo, chestnut-sided, yellow and magnolia warblers, and more.

The day continued at Boot Head Preserve. Two years ago, we got lucky and wandered into a family of spruce grouses, just after getting some audio returns from boreal chickadees in the dense forest. Last year, 0 for 2. This year, 2 for 2 again! That makes us 4 for 6 in three years, a .667  average. No major league manager could turn that away. The chickadees - multiple, yes - came zipping in and surrounded us. The spruce grouses, mother and two youngsters spooked, and then froze in a tree. Once they realized there was no danger, they resumed munching, giving us excellent opportunities to snap some photos. On the way back form the cove, I spied a tiny movement, what looked like a hummingbird moth, move from one side of the trail to the other. No! It was a fledgling black-throated green warbler. We didn't know that, of course, until the mother whooshed in and fed it. That afternoon we crossed the Rainbow Bridge to Campobello Island. We hit the hot spots - East Quoddy Head Light, FDR's summer home, etc. - finding a few pine siskins and a flock of red crossbills along the way. It was enough to keep us satiated until the next morning. That and the blueberry pie.

We hit the road at six a.m. om Saturday, on a straight line for Cutler. Just a few moments into the boat ride out to the island, bound in thick fog, the first puffins and razorbills showed themselves. It got better. We nearly ran over a northern fulmar, which, upon reflection, was probably injured. Soon, the island appeared, and the moment of truth arrived. The decision was made...we could land!

As fate would have it, I ended up in the same blind I was in two years ago. No matter. On Machias Seal Island, there's not a bad seat in the house. And, there are no seats in the blinds. Puffins lined up by the dozen a few feet away, and scurried across the roof like tiny reindeer pulling Santa's sleigh. Razorbills landed nearby, but kept a definite distance from the blinds. Common murres picked a spot even farther away.

Other birds surprised us. Savannah sparrows we expected, but the brown thrasher that shot by we did not. Neither did we plan on seeing the grasshopper sparrow that apparently only my blind saw. We spent what seemed like two hours in the blinds, a fantastic opportunity to do some up-close behavior observation. We left the island and circled it by boat, before spinning off to Gull Rock, where the seals play. On the way back to Cutler, while minke whales and harbor porpoises played to port, I called out an arctic tern floating on driftwood to starboard, alone on the sea. That was possibly the sighting of the day, until the red phalaropes blew by.

We stopped for lunch in downtown Cutler, popping into the coffee shop (she kept it open for us) for supplies. OK, for a whoopie pie or two. After that, we walked Western Head Preserve, finding more crossbills, catching up with a few black guillemots and enjoying the view from the water's edge. At the end of the day, we tried a few more side roads, and scurried home.

Sunday brought fog, fog and more fog. It definitely set the scene for the Carrying Place Cove bog. The bog is a seaside bog, cutting away with every incoming tide. That means that it's possible to walk right up and touch 12,000 years in the past, a time before homo anythingus ever walked on the North American continent. Mindboggling.

The fog slowly lifted as we approached the penultimate stop of the trip, West Quoddy State Park. The walk in was quiet, but the destination was worth it. The raised bog, full of sphagnum moss, pitcher plants, sundews, miniature black spruces and tamaracks and baked appleberries (which do actually taste like apple pies, some of us found out on this trip) was just enchanting. More crossbills. White-throated sparrows sang "O sweet Canada" in the distance, and a ring-necked pheasant called in the woods. For the third year in a row, the resident Lincoln's sparrow appeared to one of our three-time trip-goers, Ava. What are the odds? Descending from the bog, we found more black-throated green warblers and their young, and, biggest surprise of all, an immature Cape May warbler. On the way out, we wished the West Quoddy Head Lighthouse a happy 200th birthday.

After a quick stop at the easternmost gift shop in the United States (I highly reccomend a copy of Uses for Mooses), we went to our last stop and picked up a Nelson's sharptail sparrow. Bird number 100. The northern cardinal on the highway was number 101, beating last year's count by one.