[Adopted from a post I sent to the Maine Birds listserv]
Every year a group of us tries to spend an intensive day of birding in a county outside our Cumberland County homes. This year we set our sights on Somerset County. Yesterday, Monday May 19, a group of us including Doug Hitchcox, Ed Jenkins, Brendan McKay, Michael Tucker and Franklin County guest star Tim Flight worked to find as many species as we could within Somerset County lines.
Somerset is an interesting county. It's the longest north-south county in the state--stretching from Fairfield all the way up above Baxter SP to meet Aroostook County--but offers very little east-west movement. That orientation makes a day's birding pretty straightforward: start in either the north or the south and head in the opposite direction. Our accommodations were at Sugarloaf (in Franklin Co.), so we started in the forests around Flagstaff Lake and worked our way to the extreme south of the county.
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| Starting out just east of Stratton, ME |
Being a bunch of dudes with jobs and families meant that we didn't have the luxury of choosing the "best" day to bird, and the weather was a constant annoyance. We didn't see a ray of sun all day, and were constantly plagued by drizzle, rain, and at times gusting winds. But things never got nearly bad enough to quit, or anything, and while the weather certainly contributed to some misses, there are so many damn birds in northern Maine right now that we couldn't miss. We had 10 species of warbler in the drizzle at our first stop of the morning on just over the Somerset line near Stratton, and songbirds were abundant at every stop as we made our way along Big Eddie Rd. up and over Flagstaff Lake towards Long Falls Dam. Despite dedicated effort, though, we were unable to connect to any of the boreal specialties -- Boreal Chickadee, Black-blacked Woodpecker, Canada Jay, or Spruce Grouse -- that we hoped to find up there. More scouting would have helped, but those birds are tough to find. Rising winds and the drizzle kept things pretty quiet around the lake, though we did have some nice surprises, including a flock of 22 White-winged Scoters migrating north, a pair of American Bitterns, and an American Herring Gull on the lake. We headed south, out of boreal habitat.
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| Great Moose Lake |
We were invigorated by our next stop, an out-of-the-way boat launch at the north end of Great Moose Lake, near Hartland. That place was great, and featured about a dozen birds that we didn't see anywhere else in the county, including Black Terns, a majestic Sandhill Crane flyby, Northern Harrier, Pied-billed Grebe, and more. Any future Somerset County listers need to make sure this site is on their radar.
We kept moving south. A coffee break at a convenience store in Athens yielded a silent Black-billed Cuckoo in a tree across the street, reinforcing the truism that there are no bad birding spots in mid-May. We hit our first eBird hotspot of the day (and just one of three total) at 3:13pm, getting skunked in the rain at Lake George State Park. A steady diet of passerines and sharp-eyed pick-ups got us to the KVCC Alfond campus just north of Fairfield at 95 species, where we picked up Savannah Sparrow, Rose-breasted Grosbeak, Baltimore Oriole, Wood Thrush, and our century-mark clinching Willow Flycatcher.
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| Celebrating 100 species at Kennebec Valley Community College |
We got ice cream and celebrated with one last stop on Libbey Island in Fairfield. It was really birdy, though, and we ended up adding birds like Tufted Titmouse, Red-bellied Woodpecker, Tennessee Warbler, and Blackpoll Warbler. (Those last two brought our day's total to 22 warblers, missing only Prairie, Mourning, and Louisiana Waterthrush for Maine breeders.) We ended the day with 109 species in Somerset County.
We left a LOT of birds on the table -- Indigo Bunting, House Sparrow, House Finch, Great Blue Heron, etc. -- so another attempt with better weather and more efficient routing would certainly result in more birds. But we had a hell of a lot of fun, and saw a lot of beautiful places we'd never seen before. Until next year!
eBird Trip Report: https://ebird.org/tripreport/373865
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| Our checklists overlaid on a map of Somerset County. Courtesy Doug Hitchcox |
