Tag Archives: Boreal Forest

Braden’s Maine to Montana Birdventure, Part 1: A Day in “The County”

Today, FSB kicks off Braden’s accounts of his truly remarkable spring birding trip from Maine to Montana. This adventure would take him to an astonishing variety of habitats most of us never get to experience. Along the way, he would drive 5,000 miles, visit nine states and provinces, and record 264 bird species, seven of them lifers. He begins this series with a visit to Maine’s arguably wildest and most inaccessible county: Aroostook.

Twenty-four hours after walking across the stage of the Cross Insurance Center in Bangor and receiving my college diploma, I was alone in a tent in Northern Maine. I’d gone to school in the state for four years, but never experienced it in the summertime, those three months when Maine is at its best. Now, with an abundance of time, I could leisurely make my way back to Montana instead of the six-day dash I’d done across the country last August. Because of this distant deadline, I’d arranged to spend a week in Maine birding and exploring following my graduation, and there was no better place to start than with one of the two counties I’d never visited: Aroostook County.

**A Cedar Bog up in Aroostook County! This one shimmied with Palm and Magnolia Warblers.**

Known simply as “The County” to locals, Aroostook is by far the largest and least populated part of Maine. The County contains a large portion of the state’s agriculture, mostly located on its eastern flank, whereas the rest is coniferous forest. Aroostook’s high latitude and cooler climate create a haven for many boreal species of birds that have receded from their more southerly haunts because of warming and excessive logging that promotes regrowth of a different, unsuitable habitat. This northern conifer forest is also a hotspot for the primary topic of my dad’s previous post: warblers.

Warblers, in fact, were a major factor in my decision about where to go to school. I wanted to go to college somewhere where I could see as many warblers as possible, and Maine fit that bill perfectly. With almost thirty species of breeding warblers (nearly triple what Montana, a state twice the size, has) there is no better place to be, and that is especially true of Aroostook County, where most of them could be found. Lying in bed the night of Monday, May 12th, I felt nervous. It was still fairly early as far as migration goes. What if the birds weren’t here yet?

**This was my camping spot in Aroostook County, on a backroad in northern Maine!**

On Tuesday, May 13th, my worries were settled when I woke up to the sound of a Nashville Warbler singing above my tent. I dressed as quickly as I could and set off down the logging road I’d driven in on, my ears receptive to any and all of the birds sounding off in the surrounding woods. Every level of the forest had songsters belting out their tunes: Ovenbirds from the ground, Black-and-white Warblers from spruce trunks, Magnolia Warblers from ten-year-old firs and Yellow-rumped Warblers from high in the canopy. Present in lower numbers were species like Blackburnian Warblers, Black-throated Blue Warblers, and American Redstarts, all likely early representatives of their species, most of which were still farther south, booking it north.

I was especially excited about the two Cape May Warblers. While I’d seen a fair number of Cape Mays before, I’d rarely seen them in their breeding colors and I’d never heard them sing before. This is because of their distributions. While I’d encountered many of the East Coast warblers on their breeding grounds during my time in Pennsylvania, I was hundreds of miles too far south for Cape Mays, which use contiguous spruce-fir forest and are mostly confined to Canada. These warblers (which are named after Cape May, New Jersey, where they neither breed nor spend the winter) are particularly dependent on an insect known as spruce budworm. Budworms are spruce parasites, and their populations are cyclical. During outbreak years the insect infects and ravages thousands of acres of spruce trees before the population crashes. Cape May Warblers, Bay-breasted Warblers, and Evening Grosbeaks, therefore, all have populations that rise and fall with the populations of this insect.

**A “Myrtle” Yellow-rumped Warbler, which is the subspecies that lives on the East Coast!**

Besides agriculture, the main industry in Aroostook County is logging, and understandably, the logging industry is not the biggest fan of an insect that defoliates thousands of acres of their crop. Unfortunately, the industry’s historical response to spruce budworm outbreaks (which, remember, are ecologically “normal” and important for the birds dependent on them) has been to clear-cut hundreds of hectares of infected forest. Spruce-fir forest is a mature ecosystem that takes centuries to develop, however, and the forest that grows back after these clearcuts is not coniferous but deciduous. This is a major reason why many spruce budworm-specialists, like Cape May Warbler, and many other birds found in boreal forests, like Canada Jays and Black-backed Woodpeckers, have retreated from much of southern Maine in the last hundred or so years. Their habitat has simply disappeared.

I saw evidence of this as I birded The County. Sure, there was a lot of seemingly healthy spruce habitat. There were also massive empty lots, covered in nothing but slash and debris. The forests were filled with birds, while the lots had almost none. It almost seemed apocalyptic. At least the empty lots provided good views of Mt. Katahdin, Maine’s highest peak, rising in the distance.

Again, though, the forests DID have birds, and not just warblers. Many migrants had not yet arrived (namely the flycatchers, of which I saw very few), but I recorded dozens of Ruby- and Golden-crowned Kinglets, Blue-headed Vireos, and Winter Wrens. Ruffed Grouse drummed from wet thickets, Hermit Thrushes foraged in the road, and I even got to see an American Goshawk bomb overhead at a million miles per hour, chasing something or perhaps just trying to give me as least satisfying a look as possible. In the evening, a walk along a side road yielded incredible, up-close views of Canada Jays, or “Whiskeyjacks” as they are known colloquially. These subtle, white-and-gray corvids landed in the trees less than five feet from me, curiously searching for insects while paying me no mind.

**A photo of a Canada Jay that I took with my phone!**

After a night and a day spent in The County, I headed back south to investigate the other corners of Maine I had yet to explore. Stay tuned!

**What the forest looked like in Aroostook!**

Are you ready for . . . the QUACH?

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My dad walked back to the car, frowning. “Well, unfortunately it looks like we’re gonna have to go birding somewhere else today.”

I sighed, frustrated. We’d been trying to bird Swiftcurrent, in east Glacier National Park, for years, and we’d still never gotten a normal birding session there. Most years it had been closed, like it was today, because of COVID-19 or construction. The year we had gotten to bird, it had been pouring down rain, and while we scored an incredible experience with a pair of Harlequin Ducks in Lake Swiftcurrent, those were basically the only birds was saw. Now, not birding Swiftcurrent drastically decreased our chances at Boreal Chickadee, a bird we’d been wanting to find for as long as I could remember.

Reviewing our options, we could just immediately head south and hope to bird Two Medicine, and possibly arrive in West Glacier earlier than expected to look for Black Swift and Harlequin Duck. I wanted to go somewhere new, however, so we headed north towards the closed Canadian border crossing. Hopefully we could find some cool habitat, possibly with Boreal Chickadees, though that species had rarely been reported from that area of the park. Along with it being a cool bird, the main reason my dad and I wanted the chickadee so badly is because in terms of Montana lifers we’d been completely skunked during the rest of our trip, missing American Golden-Plover, Broad-winged Hawk, Magnolia Warbler and more. We’d gotten cool birds, like Sprague’s Pipit, but none of them had been new species for us.

**As we learned in Glacier National Park this summer, birding the road less traveled almost always leads to great surprises.**

After taking a short loop through the most desolate plains we’d seen yet in Montana, we turned towards Glacier’s mountains again. As we drove, the habitat shifted, first to stunted aspen forest and then tall, dense spruce-fir forest. It was a habitat I’d never seen in the state, if at all: the southernmost reaches of the vast boreal forest that stretched across Canada. As we crossed back into the national park, my dad spotted what was probably a robin, but we pulled over anyway—I was excited to see what birds were singing from this new habitat.

A Northern Waterthrush echoed from the side of the car as we got out, and several Brown-headed Cowbirds whistled from the tops of trees. Every single bird was a surprise to us, since we really had no idea what to expect. And despite the fact that we hadn’t truly entered the mountains yet, my dad’s altitude app told us that we were at more than 5000 feet!

Suddenly my dad turned around. “I just heard a chickadee.” I spotted something flit to the top of a tall spruce about fifty feet away, and raised my binoculars. While it was still too far to tell what kind, I was definitely staring at a chickadee, so I grabbed my camera from the car and hurried over to where there appeared to be a pair of them. Once we drew closer, I raised my binoculars, registering salmon flanks and a brown cap.

**Finding not one, but half a dozen Boreal Chickadees in a place we never expected not only checked off a long-held goal, but laid the crucial foundation for the QUACH!**

It was one of if not the first time I’d ever said the F-word in front of my dad! It was like my brain had exploded, I’m not sure whether from the fact that the birds were Boreal Chickadees or from the fact that we’d managed to find a new Montana species at last on this trip. The chickadees bounced around the spruces for a while, then disappeared.

After recovering from the shock, my dad and I hugged and got back in the car, intent on seeing what else we could find along this paved-yet-empty road. Starting at the closed Canadian border crossing, we drove south doing five-minute point counts along the road like we’d done searching for Sprague’s Pipit the day before.

**Seeing a White-crowned Sparrow on its alpine breeding grounds gave us new appreciation for this relatively common species.**

The most common sparrows were White-crowned Sparrows belting confusing songs from every level of the trees, and while Yellow and Yellow-rumped Warblers were present, they were at least equalled in number by Wilson’s Warblers and Northern Waterthrushes, neither of which were common in Missoula. Amazingly, we picked up Boreal Chickadee at two more points, getting much better looks and photos of three more pairs. They were one of the more common species here, too, and were by far the most common chickadee, though we also picked up a lone Mountain and a possible Black-capped, the latter from a lower altitude aspen area. Canada Jay was the most common corvid, though we also saw a single Steller’s. Another treat were two boisterous Olive-sided Flycatchers, well-known boreal forest breeders, calling and posing for us.

In the wetter areas we found Fox and Lincoln’s Sparrows, Tree Swallows and Warbling Vireos. Red-breasted Nuthatches, Ruby-crowned Kinglets, Pine Siskins and Chipping Sparrows greeted us at most stops. We also got a Varied Thrush, which was a surprise as we were probably about two miles from the easternmost limit of its breeding range.

**What? A Mountain Chickadee near a Boreal Chickadee? What was this songbird madness???**

I’d recently read a book about the lack of birds in the boreal forest, and while there definitely was lower diversity than say, the wet second-growth of West Glacier, it was not as if there weren’t any birds. At most stops we picked up at least three or four species singing or calling.

After drinking our fill of the boreal forest and saying goodbye to the chickadees, we headed south along the eastern edge of Glacier National Park. We stopped at a good-looking, alder-filled riparian area for lunch, picking up new species for the day like Black-headed Grosbeak, Lazuli Bunting and our first-of-year MacGillivray’s Warbler, then got onto Highway 2 again, back in familiar territory.

When we reached West Glacier, though, we discovered something tragic—you had to have a permit to enter the park, a new rule they’d employed to counter the insane surges of tourists they’d had the past few years! Thankfully, we could enter without a permit after 5 p.m., but still it was sad that the days of entering Glacier easily may be over.

**Since we know them mostly from burn areas, this Olive-sided Flycatcher at a roadside pullout proved a special delight!**

We parked by the old park entrance to wait until five o’ clock, and while my dad took a nap I wandered around the healthy mountain-riparian forest along the milk-blue Middle Fork of the Flathead River. As I hiked, I suddenly heard more chickadees calling, and in a dense patch of Lodgepole Pine I found them: Chestnut-backed Chickadees!

Earlier in the day, after seeing the Boreal Chickadees, I’d mentioned to my dad: “Just you wait. We’ll somehow manage to see three of the four chickadee species and have trouble finding a Black-capped.” Black-capped, of course, is well-known for being not only the most common chickadee in Montana but also one of the most common birds here, period.

Suddenly, my fear had come true: I’d seen the three most difficult chickadees in one day, but had not yet seen a Black-capped (while again, we’d possibly heard one up by the Canadian border, it had not been a positive identification so we hadn’t counted it). I rushed back to the car to wake my dad.

“Let’s go find some cottonwoods. I need to see a Black-capped Chickadee.”

As we drove around West Glacier (the town; the park hadn’t opened yet), I rolled down my windows, straining to hear any piece of a chickadee call. We pulled into a fishing access parking lot surrounded by cottonwoods and began walking, though the birds were fairly quiet. Four in the afternoon was about as bad a time as you could go birding, yet here we were, trying to find one that we saw in our backyard every single day. I promised to myself that if we found a Black-capped, I would memorize its scientific name, Poecile Atricapillus.

After admiring a gorgeous male Rufous Hummingbird that posed for us, I heard a chickadee call from behind me. Then, a sharp-looking Black-capped flew towards us, landing mere inches from us on a branch! I’d done it! I restrained myself from hugging the chickadee and instead gave my dad a high-five in celebration of the Quad-Chickadee Day I’d had—or, as my dad officially christened it, “the Quach.”

Note: “Quach” is a registered trademark of FatherSonBirding, legally protected throughout the solar system. Anyone using it will be subject to massive fines and stern looks. Not really. But you heard it here first!