A little birding in Downeast Maine

My wife and I headed to New England for a few days, with a stop in the Berkshires of Massachusetts on our way to Bar Harbor. On the 1,500-mile roundtrip, I didn’t have a lot of time for birding. But at Acadia National Park, we had some lovely close encounters with ruby-throated hummingbirds, and I added a lifer that had eluded me for years.

Acadia National Park, which spreads over nearly 50,000 acres on Mount Desert Island, is a place of wonder and one I’ve always wanted to visit. We spent the better part of one day there. The drive under the magnificent canopy of trees on the Park Loop road was delightful, and the views down to the shore studded with massive boulders were spectacular.

The highlight at the park came at the Wild Gardens of Acadia at the Sieur de Monts nature center. The garden has trails sluicing through all sorts of native plants, and we marveled at the variety. When we reached a section with plentiful cardinal flowers, my wife spotted a hummingbird on a tree branch just above me. The bird zipped off before I could swing my camera up, but we figured with all the cardinal flowers nearby, it would come back.

It did, flying in with two others. One of them spent a couple of minutes probing the blossoms on one section of the cardinal flowers, and I had plenty of time to catch some nice shots. A couple of the photos, like the one topping this post, show drops of nectar in the air after the hummer plucked it from a blossom. There’s also a droplet on the lower portion of the bird’s beak.

Then came a surprise. “What’s that bird behind those leaves?” my wife asked, pointing into some ferns. I strained to see what she was seeing through the green leaves, but then I saw it — an American woodcock was preening itself just off the trail about 10 feet from me.

A park employee soon came by and told us the woodcock had been hanging around the garden for a few days. I was elated to see the woodcock, as it was a long-awaited lifer for me. I had my 150-600 mm zoom on my camera, and my shot selection was limited. I got peekaboo looks at the bird and I’m happy with my photos.

The only other birding I got to do in Maine was at Hadley Point, near our motel a couple of miles up from Bar Harbor on Highway 3. The tide was out when I arrived around 7 a.m., and all I was able to spot were some herring gulls, double-crested cormorants, a great black-backed gull and a great blue heron. American goldfinches were chirping from the trees on the edge of the beach.

All in all, the visit to Maine was thoroughly enjoyable. I want to go back and explore more of the coast and also get inland a bit. If and when I go back to Acadia, I’ll aim to do it off-season. On the day of our visit, Aug. 26, the parking lots and roadside parking spots were jammed to near full. We left the park with much unseen, and that beckons us back. 🦅