BANGOR DAILY NEWS • September 16, 2022
Many of the birds that we think of as “ours” are merely here for five months. Then they fly off, and belong to somebody else. Often, their behavior elsewhere is different from their behavior here. The tropics provide very different habitat. Much of the competition is due to the squeeze factor. Roughly 68 percent of the Earth’s land mass is in the northern hemisphere. When our birds fly to the tropics in winter, they must squeeze into a much smaller territory, competing with all the year-round resident birds, as well as all the other migrant species that flee Maine’s winter for somewhere more equatorial. It’s an OK place to spend the winter, but not a great place to raise kids. ~ Bob Duchesne