An Extraordinary Opportunity to Help Maine’s Grassland Birds

Maine is legendary for its blueberries. These small, deep-blue spheres have a candy, wealthy, and earthy style that appears to someway seize the deep historical past of the place they arrive from: barren lands taken over by tenacious and hardy crops because the glaciers melted away many hundreds of years in the past. Blueberry barrens within the final century have been maintained by way of hearth and mowing to encourage lowbush blueberries, a shrubby plant with a stature of 10 or 12 at greatest however that may produce tight clumps of tiny fruit that flip the rocky fields blue in good years.

Blueberry barrens have gotten more and more scarce on the Maine panorama. Traditionally they have been already confined to the comparatively few locations the place the situations are good for low blueberry crops. In fashionable instances, land administration (typically together with rigorously managed fires and mowing) has stored the fields from rising up into forests. In current a long time, housing developments, adjustments within the blueberry business, and different components have led to the lack of increasingly of those acres of blue.

The habitats which are blueberry barrens are additionally residence to a collection of particular—and more and more uncommon—birds and different wildlife in addition to crops. Species just like the upland sandpiper, a large-eyed, small-headed sandpiper whose distinctive wolf-whistle (sweEET-WHEEeer) is given from excessive above the bottom because it flutters in show. There was a time when these birds occurred extensively in hayfields and blueberry barrens throughout the state. Now, within the southern a part of Maine, there are solely a handful of locations left the place they nonetheless happen.

Vesper sparrow, a big sparrow with white outer tail feathers, chestnut-patches on the wings (therefore one among its very previous names, the “bay-winged bunting”), and a propensity to sing vigorously within the evenings (“vesper” means “night” in Latin), is one other specialist of blueberry barrens. In southern Maine, it, too, might be discovered nesting at only some scattered places. Even the savannah sparrow, a short-tailed species with a buzzy tsee-tsay track that we used to consider as ubiquitous throughout hayfields and different open habitats within the state, is tougher and tougher to seek out nowadays.

These are a number of the explanation why the current announcement by the Midcoast Conservancy of a mission to guard 263 acres of the famed Clarry Hill Highlands—one of many final blueberry barrens within the Midcoast area—is so critically essential. When this extraordinary property, with its sweeping views of Camden Hills and Muscongus Bay, was lately put available on the market, it appeared destined to be misplaced to one more cookie-cutter subdivision or maybe a McMansion, and with it, but extra acreage that’s so essential for grassland birds.

Fortunately, the Midcoast Conservancy was in a position to negotiate a deal that positioned the property inside attain, offering sufficient individuals can step in to assist reserve it. However time is of the essence: the mission requires funds to be raised by the tip of summer time 2023. Saving this parcel of Clarry Hill would add to these beloved items of Clarry Hill which have already been protected due to the Land for Maine’s Future program, supported by the Pure Sources Council of Maine, which you’ll be able to examine on the NRCM web site.

Clarry Hill, when you’ve by no means been fortunate sufficient to go to, is a spectacular blueberry barren atop a hill break up between Union and Waldoboro. As a crow flies it’s three miles east of the well-known Morse’s Sauerkraut and two miles west of the Union Fairgrounds. Generations of birders attending Audubon’s Hog Island camp have been taken there every summer time to see and listen to birds like upland sandpipers, vesper sparrows, and savannah sparrows. Sadly, apart from event migrant stop-overs, upland sandpipers haven’t been confirmed breeding there in the previous few years however vesper sparrows and savannah sparrows might be see from April onward by way of the autumn. It’s additionally residence to many different birds species and is a favourite native sizzling spot for hawk-watching.

We urge all our devoted readers to contemplate contributing to this important marketing campaign to guard one of many final of the rarest habitats in Maine. You will discover out extra on the webpages of the Midcoast Conservancy.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for Nationwide Audubon. Dr. Wells is without doubt one of the nation’s main chook consultants and conservation biologists. He’s a coauthor of the seminal “Birds of Maine” guide and writer of the “Birder’s Conservation Handbook.” His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for a few years. Allison Childs Wells, previously of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director on the Pure Sources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership group working statewide to guard the character of Maine. Each are extensively revealed pure historical past writers and are the authors of the favored books, “Maine’s Favourite Birds” (Tilbury Home) and “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Website and Discipline Information,” (Cornell College Press).