I spent a few hours today slogging around Scarborough Marsh with some birding friends and Amy Sinclair (and Don behind the camera) from Channel 13 news. Peter Vickery is working on “The Birds of Maine” book, and we organized a search team to try and dig up some data on Yellow Rails.

Yellow Rails are elusive swamp dwellers that breed in boreal bogs. Some may breed in north-central Maine, but many breed in the St. Lawrence River Valley. Migrants pass through Maine in small, but likely regular, numbers. A hundred plus years ago, rail hunters regularly shot them in our coastal salt marshes. However, there has not been a verified sighting of one during fall migration in the southcoast in about 30 years. Are they just not being detected? There’s few rail hunters left, and there’s few birders spending the time wading through rising tides looking for them. They are small, camouflaged, and secretive, so finding a migrant Yellow Rail is no easy task.

Thanks to a full moon, high tides are substantially higher than normal. Plus, with all the rain that we had, more water is traveling down the rivers and filling up marsh pools. So, with more marsh underwater, there is less dry land for a Yellow Rail to seek cover in. This would then give us a slightly smaller haystack to search for our needle in.

Yesterday, a number of small teams hit various marshes, and today we decided to more thoroughly search a couple of promising areas. Peter, Don, Denny, Ed, and Sasha (my dog) and I began the day searching the marsh around Jones Creek, behind the Clambake Restaurant. Then, we thoroughly combed the edge of Eastern Road and the marsh to the northeast of the road. We splashed around the edges of the marsh, waded through pools of water (more than once I had water flow in over the top of my boots – a lot of good those did today!), and jumped across channels. Sasha didn’t know why she was out in the marsh, but she was having the time of her life (Rails tend to fly from dogs, but slink away from humans, so we thought Sasha – despite not having any training as a bird dog – could only help our cause). She did add Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrow to her life list, and she found a couple of voles, and a Peregrine-killed Green-winged Teal carcass that I had to stop her from snacking on.

But, despite all of our (especially Sasha’s) best efforts we finished the day rail-less. Well, there is value to “negative data,” and we certainly did have a pleasant day of birding. A number of raptors were overhead, including a Northern Harrier or two, a Bald Eagle, a Merlin, and a number of Sharp-shinned Hawks. About 8-10 Nelson’s Sharp-tailed Sparrows were flushed out of the marsh here and there, 2 “Ipswich” Savannah Sparrows were along Eastern Road, and the first two Snow Buntings any of us have seen this fall were also along the road. (Oh goodness – SNOW BUNTINGS. Winter can’t be too far off!). Certainly a highlight was an American Bittern that flew from the edge of Eastern Road, also pushed up by the very high tide. Basically, we were just loking for an excuse to go play in the water!

So, keep an eye out for Amy Sinclair’s piece on today’s birding adventure on WGME Channel 13 News at 6 sometime in the next week or two. I’ll let you know if I get a heads up as to when it will be in. Lucky for us, none of us fell face first into any salt pannes!

Earlier in the day, starting at Sandy Point on Cousin’s Island in Yarmouth, at dawn, a fair number of birds were moving overhead, mostly American Robins and Yellow-rumped Warblers. A lingering Common Yellowthroat, a handful of “Yellow” Palm Warblers, at least 3 Black-throated Blue Warblers, and a late Black-throated Green Warbler, 3 or more Blue-headed Vireos joined a number of Dark-eyed Juncos, and a plethora of White-throated Sparrows. With a mostly rain-free night last night, birds were really on the move! There were also at least 1000 Double-crested Cormorants were in a feeding frenzy offshore, with at least 50 Bonaparte’s Gulls attending. Then, at Pine Point in Scarborough, I found two late Brown-headed Cowbirds hanging out with a flock of House Sparrows, and there was a small group of shorebirds roosting on the jetty as the tide came in: 30 Black-bellied Plovers, 3 Semipalmated Sandpipers, 5 White-rumped Sandpipers, and 31 Dunlin.