Delimited Site Visit #4 - The Junk Pond

May 3rd 2018, Evergreen Cemetery, Portland, ME

Bird Cast said that we were suppose to see large numbers of birds moving through and it was right on the money. This is from an email I sent the Maine birds listserv talking about hose many birds were around:

I birded Evergreen Cemetery from the 'junk' pond to the big pond and back.

To say the least it was overwhelming. There were hundreds of YELLOW-RUMPED WARBLERS and
WHITE-THROATED SPARROWS. In fact, when I first got there there was so much noise on the forest
floor that I was sure a WHITE-TAILED DEER herd was going to pop out at any moment. No deer just
hundreds and hundreds of sparrows. As I walked, the forest floor kept leaping, it was kind of creepy, as
if the floor had come alive. I'm sure that I missed a lot because I was trying to count those two species.

There were a number of other warbler species and other fun birds, but the real highlight for me was a
COMMON WHIP-POOR-WILL. I flushed the bird as I was walking between the ponds and got to
spend a bit of time observing the bird before it flew off into the forest. I got a number of pictures and
will upload them to my eBird checklists later.

I started my time at the junk pond at 5:45am. As I mentioned above I was a little bit overwhelmed with all the birds at the time. One of the first things that I noticed was that the willow trees had really leafed out recently. They had moved along greatly since my last visit and nearly had full leaves on them. The other thing which quickly stood out to me upon visiting was the bugs. In my last visit there wasn't much in the way of flying bugs but this time there were noticeable numbers of them.

The amount YELLOW-RUMPED WARBLERS was the most I had ever seen at this site. They were everywhere and they just kept coming in more and more. I really spent the most of my time trying to keep up on the species which were flocking in. The last birds I found before leaving that morning were a male and female WOOD DUCK. In the past years WOOD DUCKS have nested in and around this little pond and I'm very curious to see if they do it again this year.

My checklist from just the site is here.
And my checklist from the rest of time at Evergreen is found here.

Posted on May 6, 2018 07:11 PM by hallnatec