The Wrack

Bird bander June Ficker recalls how she got started netting saw-whet owls, shares some details about the birds she has banded, and explains a few precautions taken during the autumn saw-whet season…

The following was published in the Biddeford-Saco Journal Tribune Sunday edition, 9/8/13:

For the past 34 years, my mother has thrown a family reunion on Labor Day weekend. Thirty to fifty of us arrive from all over the Northeast and Canada for four days of feasting, toasting, singing, dancing, even a “Geezers vs. Young Bucks” softball game. It’s an annual weekend devoted to celebrating, shoulder to shoulder, our lifelong ties and the continuity of our families and traditions.

Meanwhile, for those who devote themselves to the monarch butterfly, there has been no celebration yet. This month, on this side of the Rockies, monarch adults from Maine to Alberta should be flying 2,500 miles back to a few square acres within the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, a World Heritage Site sixty miles northwest of Mexico City, where they overwinter from October to March. They should be, but they aren’t.

Goal

To improve understanding of spatial and temporal patterns of migratory land bird movement in coastal and offshore regions of the northeast, in order to assess vulnerability to offshore wind development and guide responsible siting of turbines.

Turning the bend on the Laird-Norton trail, the path narrows.  Above, rivulets of blue are breaking apart a gray sky. To the right, the weathered brown bark of an apple tree is imprinted with the secret language of the yellow-bellied sapsuckers.  To the left, the emerald expanse of honeysuckle leaves are dotted with red berries.  Below, a worn path parts a sea of green shaggy grass… embedded with a shaggy spot of black!

Fog: welcome hydration after the heat wave. Lunch on the porch. Barn swallows, and a couple of trees, whip past incessantly. A vigilant starling keeps going to the gutter with a beakful of food and leaving without one. Two adolescent bluebirds perch on the sapling chestnut and its wire barrier, watching for bugs. I imagine it's their dad who stops while passing downhill, sporting colorful leg bands he probably got a few miles (not a few rods) away. A mockingbird moves in and out of the Sialia space without its typical confidence. To the west, somewhere along the swampy head of the Muskie Trail, cu-cu-cu, cu-cu-cu, cu-cu-cu, cu-cu-cu. The rain crow.

Every spring the rivers of Maine are home to a unique phenomenon. As the water temperatures rise above 12.8°C (55° F) alewives begin their annual migration upstream to the lakes and ponds where they were born. This evolutionary strategy is known to biologists as anadromy and is shared with nine other native species including Atlantic salmon and rainbow smelt.

Historically, the schools of spawning fish in our rivers numbered in the millions, and were a significant economic and nutritional resource. Even today, some coastal Maine towns have an annual alewife harvest where these fish are caught by the thousands to be sold for lobster bait, or even smoked and sold to adventurous gourmands or locals with a taste for traditional fare. One notable alewife run takes place in mid-coast Maine at Damariscotta Mills. The fish ladder that bypasses the dam at the outlet of Damariscotta Lake is a great place to see these seasonal visitors.

Encountering thousands of itty bitty jumping bugs on a lunch jaunt.

A 13-ton machine rolled down the "F field" to make habitat for a 2-pound rabbit. As the grassland greens up this spring, the evidence should fade quickly away.

We in Maine don't have much call for marking Groundhog Day. Our groundhogs are lying low before checking for any shadows.

I stopped short on the wooden boardwalk of the Laird-Norton Trail. The fog of my breath flew a few more feet ahead of me, dissipating slowly in the still air. It was my first time at the Reserve, and I was alone in the woods.

And something was coming towards me. Something big.

I tried to swivel my ears in the direction of the sound. Picture a grown man in a business suit, in a ski hat with pinned-up earflaps, trying to swivel his ears.

Crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch it came, approaching quickly.