Upland Sandpiper and Puffins in ME. 6/15/2024.

Taylor and I took a short vacation up to Boothbay, ME mostly to go to the Maine Botanical Gardens as well as to Egg Rock Island. On the way, we stopped in Brunswick, ME to check out a possible site to see an Upland Sandpiper. This beautiful bird prefers large areas of grassland to breed and nest, and they are not often seen in New England, preferring the large expanses of grassland out west. There are a few locations, however, where they are consistently seen and this airport area was one of them. Their call is a crazy, long, drawn out wolf whistle and males like to perch on fences and posts during breeding season which was exactly what this male was doing when I snapped its picture. A beautiful bird and lifer.

While we were in Boothbay, we went on a whale watching trip on Captain Fish's boat out to Eastern Egg Rock which is located in outer Muscongus Bay. It was nice to see a healthy population of Puffins on the rock and in the surrounding water along with gulls, Common Eider and young, Common and Least Terns and quite a few Wilson's Storm Petrels. I had seen a number of Puffins while on Machias Island further north, but this particular island is home to the world's first restored seabird colony. The methods initiated here in 1973 have been replicated dozens of times worldwide to help endangered and threatened seabirds. Gull management, the translocation of nearly 1,000 young puffins from Newfoundland, and social attraction (decoys and mirror boxes) were the primary tools for restoring these puffins. In response to the puffin restoration, five pairs of puffins began nesting in 1981; by 2017, at least 172 pairs were nesting on the island, and as of 2021, there were 188 nesting pairs.

On the way back from Eastern Egg Rock, we were also saw a Humpback Whale with a young calf, Atlantic White-sided Dolphins, and, amazingly, a Basking Shark. The latter is the second largest shark behind the Whale Shark and is a strict vegetarian preferring plankton as its food source. The Basking Shark can reach 26 feet in length but, unfortunately, like many animals in the ocean, it is being overfished and becoming threatened.