ELLSWORTH AMERICAN • June 16, 2022
The Fourth Annual Rangeley Birding Festival wrapped up with the John Bicknell Award for Birding Conservation presentation at the Rangeley Inn on Saturday evening. The 2022 John Bicknell Award for Birding Conservation was presented to Leslie Clapp of Blue Hill, president of the Downeast Chapter of Maine Audubon. Under Clapp’s direction, the most significant conservation effort of the Downeast Chapter of Maine Audubon has been the Bluebird Trail. The trail was started 15 years ago with just 20 houses in two locations. Under Clapp’s direction, it presently has over 400 homes in 117 areas. Clapp oversees this process, sending out data sheets, instructions and visuals for the monitoring process, getting GPS coordinates for all houses and compiling the data sheets. Last year on the Bluebird Trail, there were 337 birdhouses monitored by citizen scientists. From those 337 monitored houses, six house wren, 229 black-capped chickadee, 393 Eastern bluebird and 572 tree swallow chicks fledged.