A strong cold front moved through in the early evening yesterday. The strong northwesterly winds behind it basically shut down passerine migration for the night. Therefore, it wasn’t too surprising that birding was a bit slower this morning than it has been. I spent most of the morning exploring the Center Pond Preserve in Phippsburg, where I will be leading a free birdwalk for the Phippsburg Land Trust on Wednesday. See their website for more information. Hopefully, migrants will be more active than they were this morning – the beaver pond area looks fantastic for hungry migrants – but I did have 8 species of warblers today. The highlight though, was finding a nest-hole full of rapidly growing Hairy Woodpecker chicks. I THINK I’ll be able to find the hole again on Wednesday.

In other news . . .
Mainer Jeff Wells was in New York this weekend for the International Migratory Bird Day, giving a presentation on Nocturnal passerine migration, a topic that I have been talking quite a bit about recently.

Meanwhile, the second field season of effort to find Ivory-billed Woodpeckers has come to an end, without finding the smoking gun proving the existence of WMD’S (Woodpeckers of Massive Dimensions, that is!).

I also wanted to point out an article that was printed in Birding Magazine a few months ago, and is now available online. This article, by extremely well-known birder – and yes, hunter – Pete Dunne is an excellent piece on how birders and hunters should be working together more often than we work against each other. “Common Ground” details how Pete believes that the interests of both hunters and birders, and each group’s futures that are “dependent upon preserving natural lands (need to) forge an alliance which accomplishes precisely that – and that we need to do it NOW!” Subscribers to National Audubon’s Magazine are familiar with the great writings of Ted Williams, who also works to bridge the gap between hunters and environmentalists. Sure, some birders are completely anti-hunting, and some hunters are anti-everything except killing stuff while drunk, but these are definitely the minority in each group. And for the future of both pursuits, let’s hope we all realize this.

And finally today, Jeannette and I are pleased to announce two Wild Bird Center of Yarmouth publications that are a valuable resource to Maine birders. The first is the “Official Checklist of Maine Birds” complied by the Maine Bird Records Committee. This is a listing of all 423 species “positively documented in Maine,” including breeding status and “review list species.” We’ve published it for the first time, using a handy three-fold style. Also, we have published the first of our (hopefully many) Regional Checklists featuring a special place or area in Maine. The first of the series is Monhegan Island by Peter Vickery. This checklist includes all of the species recorded on Monhegan, breeding status, and – a great resource for Maine birders – seasonal abundance codes. See our website for more info.