Maine’s birdwatching community is aflutter over the sighting this week of two species never before seen in Maine — one that usually hangs out in Mexico and the other in Europe.
The first rare bird was caught on camera Monday thanks to an international user of a well-placed webcam at an osprey nest on Hog Island, in Bremen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IcTGkbcmp9M
“The discovery was probably the coolest or most bizarre part of this,” says Doug Hitchcox, staff naturalist for the Maine Audubon society. “The camera operator, who was this woman in Germany, zoomed in on this little red bird, took a picture of it, took a great video, got the word out and (it) ended up being the first state record of vermilion flycatcher, a bird that should probably be down in Mexico right now.”
Once word was out, Hitchcox and other birders rushed to the society’s Hog Island research center in time to watch the flycatcher feast on cluster flies rising from the facility’s warming rooftops.
Two days later another birder driving through Newcastle spotted a fieldfare thrush that’s native to Europe. Hitchcox says it’s similar to the American robin, and this is the first time it’s been seen in Maine.
He says both birds’ visits to Maine are not a sign that climate change is at work. More random factors — an odd wind or an individual bird’s wanderlust — are in play, he says, when a single bird strays far beyond its usual habitat.
The gradual expansion of an avian species’ range, however, can be attributed to climate change, Hitchcox says - as with the northern cardinal and red-bellied woodpecker, both species once rare in Maine that now are regular inhabitants.