Wildlife watching

Eider duck at Cape Elizabeth ME

We have been in New England for three weeks and all my recent postings are about that trip. If you scroll down through the earlier entries you can read about the scenery, wildlife and other observations from our visit. We stayed in cabins at two waterside locations: Beaver Lake, near Derry, New Hampshire and on The New Meadows River near West Bath, Maine.

Many of the plants, birds and insects we saw were unfamiliar or new to us. We had a suitcase full of books, but many of them covered the entire USA in a pretty general way so it was hard to track down individual species. There are dozens of kinds of goldenrod for example.

Birds are well covered and you have a range of guides to choose from. Some, like the Peterson Guide, have an Eastern and a Western version so you don't have top carry a huge book around. I like David Sibley's "North American Bird Guide" but it is too bulky for field trips so I downloaded the App for my iPod and found that it worked brilliantly. It uses your location to suggest species that will occur there. The Peterson Guide is also available as an App. It's cheaper too, but it takes up more space on your drive.

The best thing about these digital guides, apart from portability, is the ability to hear bird calls and songs while you are in the field. So many calls were new to us and birds like mocking birds and even blue jays have an amazing array of sounds. We used this feature a lot, for example: While canoeing at Beaver Lake, we thought we heard someone using a high-pitched whistle to call their dog but we found out that this was the call of a broad winged hawk. I often saw them perched on posts in the early morning but I only saw one in flight. They don't seem to hunt on the wing much but you can see flocks of them soaring while on migration.

Least sandpiper at Cape Elizabeth, ME

The iPod app allows you to keep lists for each state or site you visit. I expected to see more species in coastal Maine than inland at Beaver Lake but one of our last morning's sightings leveled the scores with 76 species seen in both New Hampshire and Maine . The trees along the shore of the lake were alive with birds that day. The regular, everyday waxwings, blue jays, robins, grackles, sparrows and goldfinches were joined by yellow warblers, orioles, tufted titmice, chickadees, flycatchers, a white breasted nuthatch and downy woodpecker. I watched the shoreline trees and gardens from the dock with the light behind me and decided that Hanna, my wife shouldn't be missing this. I made her cup of tea and sent her out to sit on a deckchair on the dock, facing the shore, with a fieldguide and a pair of binoculars. She came into the cabin only a few minutes later, soaked to the skin with pond-weed in her hair. One leg of the chair had gone through a crack in the dock and sent her head over heels in to the water. I'm sorry I missed it as it would have made a great photo!

Despite missing the migrants, Hanna outscored me on sea-birds. We passed up on the chance to go whale-watching as the humpbacks had not arrived yet, but Hanna was lucky enough to get a trip with her sister Susy up to Eastport on the border with Canada and even managed to scrounge a boat trip out into the Bay of Fundy. She got very close to a fin whale and some porpoises and came back with a great bird list. Rafts of shearwaters, petrels, kittiwakes, gannets, black guillemots and grey phalaropes were associating with the whales. I'm trying to get her to write it up.

Taking opportunistic photos of wildlife is always a challenge and the results can be mixed. The professionals spend weeks setting up good mammal pictures and birds require a great deal of patience and a big lens, but it's worth a try and you can get lucky, especially if you are in a good location with wildlife all around, and you put out food.

Turtles at Beaver Lake NH

Most mammals are shy and nocturnal but chipmunks and other squirrels are incredibly obliging and cute. They will come into the house and live with you, whereas groundhogs are usually really shy. However, at the Maine Audubon headquarters at Gilsland Farm, there is a study-group of groundhogs that has become accustomed to being observed. It's a great place to see wildlife because it has a variety of habitats in a small area, lots of feeders and a steady stream of visitors so that the animals are not alarmed by your presence. An early morning or an evening visit is best for sightings but low light leads to grainy images like mine.

I have posted most of my wildlife photos from the trip here. They are  a mixed bunch, always shot in an opportunistic way and often in poor light. Some shots (skunk, raccoon and porcupine) were impossible in the dark and the ones at the State Wildlife Park were asleep! They may not all be sharp, but it's great to have a record of what you have seen. Many bird species, such as bluebirds, wilson's petrels and hummingbirds escaped my camera.  I'll just have to go back.