Fall Birds of Casco Bay with Seacoast Tours, 10/8.

It felt like summer, and this unexpectedly lingering American Oystercatcher sure made it look like summer, too.

Our fall Birds of Casco Bay with Freeport’s Seacoast Tours beat the heat on Sunday, 10/6 with a glorious trip around the bay. Record high temperatures (that soared into the mid-80’s by the afternoon), and glass-calm conditions greeted us for an unreasonably lovely fall day on the water.

Despite the heat, Arctic seaducks have begun to arrive: we encountered 59 Surf Scoters and 3 Long-tailed Ducks among the many local Common Eiders today. The combination of warm temperatures, and lots of inshore fish, have kept the bay busy, and we encountered large flocks of loafing Double-crested Cormorants, and impressive numbers of Laughing Gulls (75-100 total) for the date. We practiced our gull identification, picking them out of the masses of Herring and Ring-billed Gulls, with handfuls of Great Black-backed Gulls amongst them, mostly on oyster farms, which we also took time to learn about. We even spotted two distant Ospreys still working the local waters.

Almost as surprising as the weather, was the fact that it was shorebirds that stole the show today! We tallied well over 100 truant Semipalmated Sandpipers roosting at the high tide on various oyster farms, while the total of 126 Black-bellied Plovers were waiting out the tide on exposed rocks and ledges, especially French Island Ledge. Bird of the day honors, however, once again went to American Oystercatcher. While we now expect them on Upper Green Island on our August excursion here, we definitely did not expect to still see one there when we took a little swing out to it on our way back.

Local scenery and island history, the beginning of fall foliage, irrationally nice weather, and some good birding…not bad for a few hours of tooling around the local waters!