Howdy from Hog Island

I've got posts pre-scheduled to get us through this week AND next, but I couldn't resist breaking in for a dispatch from Maine.
Taken yesterday on Harbor Island. I am holding Liam's head up because he had the wiggles, bad. That boy had holes to dig and porpoise bones to uncover, and he just couldn't stand for a picture. Obviously I did not get the Wear a Blue Shirt memo.

Gosh, it's good to be here, with a parula warbler singing just outside in the misty cool air. We've had the most amazingly fantastic time birding, and the sun, which had been predicted to hide all week, blessed us yesterday for our cruise to Eastern Egg Rock to see puffins, and for a butterfly-studded hike on Harbor Island. This is my favorite puffin shot of the day.

The kids are enjoying themselves; life is good. Here, Liam has discovered that it is possible to make a sand angel, just as one would make a snow angel. He is putting a special twist on it, though, making his sand angel enormously anatomically correct. BOTB's son, that one.

This morning, we take a walk originally plotted out by Roger Tory Peterson in the village of Medomac, when he led birding groups around Hog Island. The place hasn't changed much, and the walk is birdy as all get out--even though Roger would be 100 this year.

Yesterday seems like a dream--an all-day cruise around Muscongus Bay. The sun broke out and smiled on us all afternoon as we picnicked and hiked on Harbor Island. Butterflies danced in the hawkweed and we squeezed through a dark cave and found a fairy house on the other side. A perfect day was capped by the news that Bill would be on NPR that afternoon. He went birding with Melissa Block and her adorable almost-six-year-old daughter Chloe, and it was all captured on tape. We got to tune in and listen, with our whole Joy of Birding group attending.

Go listen here. It's like birding with Bill.

Puffin Stuff

Daddy hauls a comatose Liam up the gangplank from the boat.

When you've been birding since you were 7 years old, and seriously birding since 1976, life birds don't come along too often. You usually have to leave the country, or go on a quest for one special bird in a habitat that's hard to get to, to add anything to your life list. I've been skunked by the Atlantic puffin, even after six weeks in Newfoundland. Only a dedicated trip to a nesting colony on Eastern Egg Rock in Muscongus Bay, Maine, could fix the hole in my life list.
I was ridiculously excited on the morning of our field trip. But I was worried enough about rough seas--the wind was tossing the spruces on Hog Island--that I took two Benadryl as we pushed off from the dock. Gave one to each kid. Mistake. It turned out to be almost flat calm out on the bay, and the medication rendered me and the kids little more than zombies. Poor little Liam, right before he konked out:
Don't worry: he held on until he saw puffins. And then he retreated to the cabin and collapsed on a pile of windbreakers and fleeces.
No amount of sedatives could dull my delight in finally laying eyes on the sea clown. They're so much smaller and cuter than I even thought, and I was sure they'd be small and cute. Wow. Everything they're billed as, and more.
They patter over the waves, trying to get airborne, their wings buzzing furiously.
Feet that match their bills:Does this look like a man in a puffin suit? Small wings help reduce drag underwater, where they use them as oars. I think they dive with the wings only partly extended, the way guillemots do, so they're beating them half-closed. Companionable little things, they travel in pairs. Their call, which we couldn't hear over the boat engine, is a lowing moan, kind of sheeplike.
Puffins nest deep in burrows beneath rocks. There, they enjoy a measure of safety from gull predation. We wouldn't have puffins nesting in Maine but for the reintroduction program, and stringent gull control efforts of Project Puffin. What a gift to give the world. Speaking of gifts, my lovely and thoughtful friend Jen, who also saw her life puffins on this trip, adopted a puffin in my name. He's 26 years old. Puffins live into their 30's. Most seabirds do...low replacement potential means they have to have a long reproductive life.
This is my favorite puffin picture from the trip. Every once in awhile I get a shot that's worth all the others piled together.
And every once in awhile I get a life bird what AM a life bird. Thanks, Maine Audubon. Thanks, Project Puffin, for adding the sea clown back into Maine's avifauna.