Jeannette and I spent a pleasant Easter morning looking for shorebirds in Scarborough Marsh. Jeannette is a volunteer for the International Shorebird Survey, which is a Western Hemisphere-wide attempt to gather information on shorebird populations organized by the Manoment Center for Conservation Sciences. Every ten days from April though mid-June and August through October, volunteers set out to identify and count migrant shorebirds at favored roosting and/or feeding locations.

Jeannette covers two sections of Scarborough Marsh: 1) The Pint Point/Old Orchard Beach section of flat sand ocean-front beach, and 2) the marshes and salt pannes along Jones Creek, which runs from behind the Pelreco Building to the backside of the Pine Point Lobster Co-op. By the way, volunteers are still needed to cover 4 of the 7 sections of Scarborough Marsh. Contact the ISS for more info, or drop us a line here at the store.

Each week, we’ll post the totals from the three covered sections of the Marsh on the bird news section of yarmouthbirds.com. But this week, I’ll save you the trouble – for one thing, our website is down (odd though - instead of nto being able to access the pages, the website has reverted back to the middle of Marsh. There's a reason I work with birds and not computers!). For another, we didn’t have a single shorebird yesterday! Well, it’s still early, and since shorebirds really don’t get going until May here, we’re not worried. Jeannette had the same negative data for this time last April. Early in the season, the shorebirds that are found in Scarborough Marsh tend to be seen in the higher sections of the marsh, at exposed mudflats at low tide and the large salt pannes at high tide.

But, despite the lack of shorebirds, we had a great morning enjoying the other marsh denizens. There was a nice aggregation of breeding plumaged Long-tailed Ducks in the Pine Point Narrows, lots of Tree Swallows, increasing numbers of Great and Snowy Egrets, and much more. Certainly the highlight, however, were two big concentrations of Glossy Ibis.

41 were feeding behind the Scarborough Marsh Nature Center, but an impressive 76 were packed together feeding in the salt pannes alongside Route 1/9. Between these two groups, we saw a majority of Maine’s Glossy Ibis! These birds were likely all part of the Stratton Island colony, the northernmost colony on the East Coast. They’re very cool birds, too, with their ridiculously long downcurved bills for probing deep in marsh muck, and their glossy bronze-and-green dress.