So, it seems winter has indeed returned to Maine! Well, while “all ya-all” were shoveling snow, Jeannette and I were watching a tropical hummingbird in 60-degree temperatures while bursting our belts with BBQ and soul food in Georgia. But, alas, we’ll pay the price – or first morning home will be (has been) spent clearing our driveway. Luckily, our snowblower has been repaired, and was dropped off at our house, but unfortunately, that snowblower is itself under a foot of snow (See addendum, however!) So, in addition to all of the usual mayhem involved with returning from a trip - albeit a brief one – such as rescuing Sasha from “camp” and catching up with voluminous quantities of emails, we’ll also be removing at least a foot of snow from our very steep, and long, driveway. Therefore, to ease the workload on Wednesday, I am writing this entry while flying home Tuesday night.

So, after two days of being stuck indoors at our annual trade show in Atlanta – and eating three meals in three days at the BBQ Kitchen (Day 1 dinner: pulled pork with collared greens, fried okra, rutabagas, and of course, cornbread. Day 2 breakfast: biscuits with sausage gravy and grits. Day 3 lunch: country fried steak with collared greens, cucumber salad, and a baked apple – with more cornbread, of course!) – we picked up our rental car and headed southeast to Dublin. Each year that we’ve traveled down here for BirdWatch America (look for some of our exciting finds to be arriving at the store in the coming weeks!), we’ve taken some time to do a little birding – a mini-vacation, if you will – somewhere in the state. This year, we only had a day and a half to “play,” since I leave for New Mexico on Friday morning, and I figured I should spend SOME time at home, and at the store, this month.

Our destination of Dublin was chosen due to one hummingbird feeder on the outskirts of town. This hummingbird feeder, ordinary by most standards, was being graced by a most extraordinary hummingbird – a Green-breasted Mango from Central (and South) America. The hummer has been frequenting these feeders for a couple of months now, and it was nice enough – and the weather temperate enough – to stick around until we got to town. Therefore, we decided to go look for the hummer, and then see what else Central Georgia had to offer – in terms of both birds and BBQ!

So, there we were – with another couple who owned a bird store (in Montreal), and were also chasing the bird after spending the weekend at the trade show. Soon, another two bird store-owners – from Florida this time – arrived, and the six of us stood there in the driveway of the hummingbird’s – and visiting birders’ – gracious host. We arrived at about 8:30 – after getting lost; I’m still not sure how it took a half hour to get somewhere that was only 8 miles from our motel! – but the bird had not yet been seen. Phew.

We enjoyed another rare hummingbird just across the street: an immature male Rufous Hummingbird that had been overshadowed in the hoopla associated with its neighbor, as well as other area feeder-birds, including lots of Chipping Sparrows and a Brown-headed Nuthatch. Then, shortly after our third party arrived, a large hummingbird zipped up to the feeder under the carport. A long, downcurved bill and a distinctive underparts pattern – three racing stripes ran down its white breast, two orange along the sides and one dark green down the middle. GREEN-BREASTED MANGO!

The visit was disappointingly brief, as the bird fed for only about 20 seconds before buzzing (humming?) out of view. Another brief visit, of only a few seconds, and the bird was on its way, and by 11:15, we decided to move on, regretfully parting ways with our friends from Massachusetts that arrived just as the Mango departed (they too were led astray by Mapquest).

“Pictures?” you ask? Well, since my camera was sitting in Maine on the kitchen table watching the snow fall, the best I can do is offer the above link to Google Images. But sometimes, the lack of a camera produces the best birding luck, so with our success in Dublin, we departed for our next twitch, heading west to Marshallville, the home of Super Sod’s fields. One of their fields in particular has been hosting another potential “mutual lifer” for me and Jeannette – a Smith’s Longspur. Despite spending over two hours combing through flocks of Horned Larks and American Pipits (which themselves were quite impressive, but at the same time, incredibly frustrating, as we knew somewhere in that field lay our quarry, and we had lots of larks to sift through if we were to find it), we were unable to locate the Longspur. Two other birders had been scouring the area since 9:30 that morning, and they too were unsuccessful today.

Batting .500 with seeing vagrants, we moved on, briefly looking for a Say’s Phoebe that had been seen on the way to our final destination of the day. We spent about a half hour checking the trees and wires around some abandoned buildings (where the bird reportedly roosts), and did our best to string an Eastern Phoebe in bad light into our target. There were quite a few other birds around, including a pair of Common Ground-Doves, and a handful of White-crowned Sparrows. Huge flocks of blackbirds, largely Red-winged, were passing overhead, heading to their evening roosts. We probably needed to wait longer to see the Phoebe – it was apparently most reliable near dusk, as it returned to roost – but we wanted to head a short distance down the road to scout out the “Cobb Owl Fields” in the fading light.

The Cobb Owl Fields are just that, fields with owls – Short-eared in this case, one of the most (if not the most?) reliable locations in the state for this enigmatic species. An open expanse of agricultural fields, regenerating stands of Longleaf Pine, and scrubby edges attract lots of small rodents, and therefore lots of small-rodent-eaters. The birding guide told us to scout for a location with good visibility and lots of hunting Northern Harriers, and the best areas vary between years depending on vegetation. Where there are lots of harriers, there are often Short-eared Owls, as these birds occupy the same exact niche – however, one hunts more during the day, and the other takes over at night. In fading or brightening light in between, both of these “crepuscular” species are active, and one often sees some inter-species dogfights during the changing of the guard.

Since we had not been here before, we wanted to make sure we had time to find the right place, so we left the first stop Say’s Phoebe-less, but soon found an overlook with lots of Northern Harriers – at least a dozen, in fact. Close to 100 Sandhill Cranes landed in the field, called a bit, seemed to settle in, but then took flight just after sunset for a roost somewhere else. Red-winged Blackbirds were funneling into the taller grasses, with some of the later arrivals occasionally pursued by a harrier or one particular late-hunting Cooper’s Hawk.

Then, as the last glow of orange faded in the western sky, a pair of long, ghostly wings fluttered out from the grass and perched on a young pine. Then, a second, and the two Short-eared Owls took flight together – soon joined by a third, and perhaps a fourth – flying like giant moths (or perhaps, mini-Mothras?) low over the fields, coursing back and forth looking for their furry breakfast.

It was nearly dark now, and the lack of light – and the beckoning of BBQ (although the BBQ place we had noted on our way in was closed; we ended up enjoying life lower on the trophic level at a Ruby Tuesday’s salad bar to help balance out our carnivorous and not-exactly-butter-free diet of our trips to Georgia) – ushered us away, heading back to Dublin for the night. Come morning (Wednesday), our birding plan was a bit different: no “twitching,” just some good ol’-fashioned birding.

We began at Beaverdam Wildlife Management area, which produced the usual suite of wintering woodland birds for the area. Sparrows were plentiful; one field alone held a flock of 200-300 Chipping Sparrows, as well as a few Vesper Sparrows. A White-breasted Nuthatch near the boat launch was a locally-good bird, as it reaches its southern limits around here.

Then, we took the “Laurens County Loop,” as described by the Birding Georgia book, to sample the avifauna of bucolic central Georgia. This day, the loop did not produce much of note – including very few ducks (just some Mallards) in the lakes and ponds of the area, and no Brewer’s Blackbirds – a local specialty. 100+ Killdeer in a cattle pasture was impressive, as was the flock of about 30 Pine Warblers feeding on the ground and bushes underneath a small grove of Pecan trees at the edge of a field. And we did encounter an overall decent diversity of birds.

Finally, after one last southern meal (fried chicken and more collard greens plus some fry-bread-style cornbread from a classic hole-in-the-wall southern soul food/BBQ place; I don’t want to know how much weight I gained in the past 4 days!), we decided to spend our last drop of free time re-visiting the Green-breasted Mango. We arrived at about 1:00, and the Mango made a frustratingly brief visit at about 1:10, and it did not reappear by the time we departed at 2:15 (although the Rufous Hummingbird across the street put on a good show). Then, it was the long drive back to Atlanta, spotting Loggerhead Shrikes along the fence lines and Black and Turkey Vultures soaring overhead.

So now, here I am, on the plane back home to the great white north, complete with two kicking and screaming kids directly behind us; I’m not going to be sleeping on this flight, so I might as well be blogging! I expect Wednesday and Thursday to be whirlwind days as we catch up at the store, continue to manage a particular vendor crisis, avoid eating any meat or anything that is fried in order to apologize to my body, and scurry to prepare to leave for eight days in New Mexico on Friday (weather permitting, of course, which is looking a bit iffy at the moment), as I head out to co-lead my first tour with WINGS Birding Worldwide.

Hopefully I’ll be able to get out for a couple of hours of birding and/or cross-country skiing on Thursday, but with an early flight on Friday, my January’s Maine birding continues to be severely limited. Yeah, I know, this is a Maine birding blog, but you’ll just have to bear with me for a little while longer!

Talk to all ya’all soon . . .

ADDENDUM:
1) When we pulled up to our driveway, we were shocked to find our driveway clear of snow! We were also surprised to NOT see our snowblower at the top of the hill. We had our hypothesis, but at 11:30pm we were not about to make any phone calls. On Wednesday morning, however, we did call our neighbors, who confessed to being our “driveway fairies,” and we owe them big time! They noticed we were obviously not around, and fearing a repeat of the Pownal Glacier ’05, Pete was kind enough to take care of that for us. We owe them big time! And, as we feared, Ace Hardware didn’t “get around” to dropping off the snowblower yet. They promised it today. Lovely. Pete really saved our butts, especially since I still couldn’t have cleared the driveway this morning!
2) I gained 4 pounds on this trip – in 4 ½ days. I didn’t think that was possible!

ADDENDUM II:
1/17.
This morning, I did indeed get outside for a bit, first for a snowshoe with Sasha at Hedgehog Mountain Park (2+ Common Redpolls), followed by a little birding around Freeport and Yarmouth. There's still very little ice in the Harraseeket River, so the South Freeport Town Landing and Winslow Park failed to produce any Barrow's Goldeneyes, and in fact, very few ducks at all were present at either location. Meanwhile, in Yamrouth Harbor, all three Mergansers were present (1 Common, 7 Hooded, and 13 Red-breasted) plus a lone hen Greater Scaup. And, at the store's feeders today, a flock of 40-50 Common Redpolls have been present; I'm desperately searching for a Hoary among them!)