Kirk hired me for another day of private guiding (see www.yarmouthbirds.com for more info) on Friday. Kirk’s a bird photographer, so our goal was to add new species to his photo library – not unlike a birder seeking additions to our life lists. We decided to give the Kennebunk Plains a try, as a number of the breeding species here are rare and local elsewhere and the state, and a few of them would be new birds for Kirk.

Of course, the hardest part of guiding for a photographer is that I don’t just have to find the bird, I have to find it close enough to photograph (well). That was our challenge today, and although we saw 2 Grasshopper Sparrows and at least 6 Upland Sandpipers, they were not very close. Vesper Sparrows on the other hand, were more than cooperative today – in fact, extraordinarily so, as Kirk nearly filled a memory card on Vesper shots alone. The rest of the cast of characters (Field Sparrow, Eastern Meadowlark, etc) were present and accounted for as well, but Prairie Warblers were conspicuously few and far between for us – and this is one of the species I thought we had the best chance to photograph well!

After a few hours in the Plains, we checked out the Sanford Sewerage facility for shorebirds. There were some – I had certainly hoped for more – but low water levels from our (continuing) lack of rain had spread those birds out more widely than the norm. A few individuals did cooperate for the camera today, however. My totals for the visit were: 34 Semipalmated Sandpipers, 28 Semipalmated Plovers, 6+ Least Sandpipers, 6 Spotted Sandpipers, 6+ Killdeer, 2 White-rumped Sandpipers, and 1 Lesser Yellowlegs, along with a pair of Ring-necked Ducks.

There were some birds on the move Thursday night into Friday, as exemplified by the 2:00am (Friday morning) radar . . .

. . . But the radar images from Friday night into Saturday proved that there are plenty of birds still working their way north. By the 2:00am radar image, it’s tough to tell what is bird and what is rain, but there were certainly a lot of birds on the move. Here are the 10:00pm, 12:00am, 2:00am, and 4:00am radar images:

Some of these birds overhead overnight added to our success on our Saturday morning birdwalk. A Willow Flycatcher was my first for the park, while other definite migrants included a pair of Blackpoll Warblers. While we – and especially our gardens – were all very happy to have some rain in the morning hours, and we were prepared for some more showers this morning, none of us (and none of the professional meteorologists and/or TV weather people) were expecting to experience nickel-sized hail while out birding this morning. You can read about our outing – from the excellent birding to the meteorological misadventure on the news page of our website.