Take your birding to a new dimension, literally! Learning to identify birds by their songs or calls will help you find more birds, and aurally read the landscape. In this program we’ll focus on the skills to identify and recognize different vocalization, rather than just playing hundreds of recordings, but there will be plenty of examples! On Tuesday, May 17th, at 7 p.m., York County Audubon is pleased to host YCA Board member Doug Hitchcox who will present this program on “birding by ear.”   Doug is the Outreach Coordinator for the Maine Bird Atlas and Staff Naturalist for Maine Audubon. … Continue reading →

On May 18th, Wildlife professor John Marzluff will bring us an exciting program on recent work in Yellowstone National Park which looked at interactions between ravens, wolves, and people.  Ravens are known to scavenge food from wolves and people but the relationship has not been well studied. In 2019 Matthias Loretto and presenter John Marzluff began tagging ravens in Yellowstone with radio transmitters that are similar to the transmitter in your mobile device.  After tagging and following many ravens they were able to relate raven’s movements to the activities of people and wolves. From this the scientists gained a better … Continue reading →

Among the most amazing creatures in the world, more than 40 species of birds-of-paradise live in New Guinea’s swaths of the Indo-Pacific rainforest region, one of the largest intact tropical forested areas on Earth. The stars of the show in National Geographic and PBS Nature TV documentaries, the birds-of-paradise have become icons of New Guinea’s rainforests. Their extraordinary beauty is unlike that of any other birds on Earth, but it’s their wide range of bizarre breeding behaviors that captivates audiences—from elaborate dancing and flaring their elegant plumes to shape-shifting displays that make these exotic species seem like avian transformers. Edwin … Continue reading →

By the middle of the 20th century, the populations of many species of seabirds in the Gulf of Maine had been decimated.  Puffins had last nested on Eastern Egg Rock in 1885 and terns in 1936.  In 1973, National Audubon started a program to reintroduce and establish the Maine breeding grounds for these species, led by seabird visionary Steve Kress.  In 2019, forty-five years later, Steve retired and turned over the program to new leadership. The program has proved exceptionally successful. The population of Atlantic Puffins has grown to more than 1,000 nesting pairs on five coastal Maine islands, and … Continue reading →

Bird photography has never been more popular, and we’d like to offer some help to improve your results and your enjoyment as well!  On Tuesday, July 21st, at 7 p.m., we’ll be presenting our second online Zoom program, this time on Improving Your Bird Photography.  To register for this event, please click on the link in the paragraph in bold font at the bottom of this post. If you’ve ever tried to photograph birds, you know it’s often not easy. Your subjects are small, fast, and shy… they move around a lot, they’re most active early and late in the … Continue reading →