Maine

Belfast Harbor, Belfast Maine. Our friend Beth lives here (isn’t she lucky) and showed us around her wonderful town.

Belfast is also a real working lobster town as are many of the towns along the coast.

Here’s another thing that we experienced in Belfast: a GIANT Whoopie Pie. Oh my. Beth directed us to the Belfast Variety where—if you go all the way to the back corner—you’ll find these dinner plate sized treats. Um yes, it was good.

I got my birding notebook stamped at the Acadia Park HQ on our first day on Mount Desert Island As you can see, it’s the park’s Centennial. I love National Parks. My goal is to visit all of them. Better get cracking.

It was foggy, misty and occasionally rainy our first day in the park but in some ways it added to beauty and mystery of discovering new places. Also, not many people were around so, in an often busy park, we felt like we had the place to ourselves.

Part of the fun of spending time on the coast, was seeing new birds like this Black Guillemot. They use their wings like paddles to dive up to 50 ft to catch small fish.

Mainers are very friendly, helpful and polite. Including the park rangers. I could use a hat like that.

Acadia has a must-do 27 mile driving tour. It was really worth every minute with beautiful places to stop every at every turn. We couldn’t stop at all of them, but we hit the highlights.

Because the land that makes up the Park was acquired over many years, there are pockets of private land mixed in with the park land. This working lobster house is on Otter Cove, if I remember correctly.

One of the more beautiful places was Sand Beach, a little cove that gets pounded by the waves and after thousands of years, gazillions of tiny shell fragments made a “sand” beach. It had been foggy and drizzly all morning but as we came upon the beach, the sun peaked out. It was magical!

Here’s another beautiful place to gaze upon.

And another.

And then there was the evening we drove up to the top of Cadillac Mountain to watch the sunset. It’s the tallest peak in the park at an elevation of 1,528 feet (470 m). The sunset wasn’t amazing but the fog and clouds rolling over the islands in Frenchman’s Bay near Bar Harbor were spectacular. I’ve never seen anything like it.

I wish this was a video so you could see the movement of the vapor but this will just have to do.

These little critters were everywhere and commenced scolding the minute they decided you were too close.

Our first full day in Maine was spent at Scarborough Marsh, a 3,200 acre saltwater marsh owned by the state’s department of Inland Fisheries and Wildlife. This is a Snowy Egret, a new bird for us. They have black legs and bright yellow feet, which you can’t see but which are a striking identifying feature.

Snowy Egret

Willet. Saw one of these in the Madison area earlier this summer but they are fairly rare here and common on the east coast.

Another bird I’ve never seen before. A Glossy Ibis.

Acadia N.P. had some nice birds also. There are a number of Warbler species that spend their summers raising families in the park’s forests. This is a Northern Parula. They sing non-stop and most of the time they are high in the trees but this guy obligingly came down to eye-level.

Here is a Black-throated Green Warbler. Another persistent singer. Easy to hear but very difficult to spot.

This Herring Gull was almost too friendly. Annette wanted me to give him a ginger snap but I refrained. I’m sure previous handouts gave him the courage to get uncomfortably close. I didn’t quite trust him.

We had one rainy day on our trip during which we did some auto touring and happened across the Wendell Gilley Museum in Southwest Harbor, ME. Wendell was a prolific decorative bird carver from 1931-1983. There are over 100 of his carvings on display in the museum. The art reminded me so much of my Grandpa, Walter Schwenck, who was a prolific carver himself. There is also a collection of bird art by other Maine artists on display.

On the way home, we stopped at Plum Island, Massachusetts, which is home to the Parker River National Wildlife Refuge. This barrier island is home to a variety of wildlife and of course birds; both residents and migrants. It provides an important nesting area for the globally threatened and endangered Piping Plover. The beach where they breed is closed but we were able to get some pretty good looks at 10 or so Plovers from a part of the beach that was open. They are SUPER cute, as you can see.

The Plovers scurry around looking for insects, worms and crustaceans.

No babies while we were there but there were active nests, according to the Refuge’s Facebook page.

Total population is estimated at just 6,500 individuals.