BANGOR DAILY NEWS • March 16, 2023
The Maine Bird Atlas has been a five-year project to map bird populations across the state. The goal is to create a baseline of species distribution, so that when the survey is repeated in 20-30 years, environmental changes become more easily apparent. Five years of counting birds in the woods was a real eye-opener. There are some summer birds that I previously thought were scarce. Then I started tripping over them everywhere. Surveying for thousands of hours changed my view of the forest. Previously, I looked at it as a collection of trees and birds. By the end, I looked at the forest as a community — and I was part of it. Forest creatures understand each other in ways I hadn’t appreciated. They may speak different languages, but they share a common understanding of calls and alarms. The birds are trying to tell us something. For the last five years, I listened. ~ Bob Duchesne