MAINE SUNDAY TELEGRAM • July 21, 2024
One of the coolest trends with modern birding, which has really come thanks to advances in digital photography, is the ability to match photos of known individuals between locations. When a rare bird is seen in two different areas, historically we would have only been able to guess that it was one individual, or would have assumed they were two different birds. Our detection rate of rare birds must be incredibly low, well below 1% of all the vagrants that occur. Now, with really good digital cameras becoming more prevalent, we often end up with hundreds of photos of a single rare bird, capturing all angles and many feather details. ~ Doug Hitchcox, Maine Audubon