Contributed by Braden Collard. Collard is the president of the University of Maine at Orono’s Birding Club.
The American robins had taken over Littlefield Garden when our group of seven University of Maine Birding Club members walked through its gates on an October morning.
With all of the fruiting trees scattered across the garden, it made sense — American robins, which were approaching their peak migration as October trudged onward, loved berries and crab apples alike.
As we walked along Littlefield’s various paths, the orange-bellied birds flew past us, chasing each other and practicing their songs for next year, when they would need them to establish their territories.
While American robins were the most boisterous birds in the campus garden, they were far from the only ones around.
Large roving flocks of pine siskins, nomadic finches that fed on pine cones, fluttered in the trees above us. We also spotted several different species of sparrows hopping in the tangled messes of brush in one area.
A highlight for us appeared as we approached the old, decrepit gardening shed in the corner of Littlefield.
An eastern phoebe, a clean-looking gray bird with a dark cap, landed on a branch in front of us in full sunlight, wagging its tail in the manner indicative of the species.
Phoebes lived in the garden for seven months of the year (the warm months), and belonged to a group of birds called the aerial insectivores.
Aerial insectivores, which include flycatchers, swallows and swifts, are birds that feed exclusively on flying insects, which they will capture right out of the air. Because flying insect numbers decline in the autumn, most aerial insectivores leave around the beginning of September.
Eastern phoebes are hardy, and can stick around into early November.
The phoebe we saw in the Littlefield Garden likely had nested in the roof of the gardening shed, because phoebes often nest in places like that — front porch lights, eaves and even in pipes sticking out of houses.
After walking around the garden, we headed toward what I consider to be the University of Maine’s best birding trail on campus — the Cornfield Loop.
While the field this path loops around isn’t always growing corn, it does host a variety of birds year-round. I have seen more than 100 species of birds on it during the years I’ve attended the university.
As we walked on the path, we spotted common birds of Maine’s forest including black-capped chickadees and a tiny ruby-crowned kinglet, one of North America’s smallest songbirds.
Looking to the skies, we spotted a lone turkey vulture cruising over us as well as a young, splotchy-looking bald eagle. Young bald eagles don’t actually have white heads or tails, and are often confused with golden eagles.
We identified this one by the large white patches on its wings, which a golden eagle wouldn’t have.
We spotted our best bird of the day as we were leaving the Cornfield Loop: a colorful male black-throated blue warbler.
Almost all of the warblers have left Maine for the winter, but a few are still moving through, and this one gave us great looks.
As it hopped through the bushes in front of us, we admired its dark blue back, snow-white belly and white “handkerchief”— a tiny white spot on the bird’s wing that helped us identify it from other warblers.
All in all, it had been a great day of birding.
