A Bird’s Tale

Good migrants and good news from Canada’s boreal forest

Sat, 09/26/2015 - 11:15am

Right now, birds are streaming through Maine, headed south from their breeding grounds in Canada. Some still have a very long journey in front of them, perhaps to the Caribbean, Mexico, or South America. Some will stay in the U.S., and some will even stay right here in Maine for the winter.

Along with the birds, some good news for the birds (and by extension, for us) has drifted down in recent months from Canada. Plans to protect more than 11 million acres of Canada’s Boreal Forest region were finalized and announced over the summer. These areas include three widely separated parts of the Boreal — habitat that supports millions of migratory birds that, next spring, will with certainty be able to return to a “nursery” with no logging, mining, hydro development, or other industrial activities on the landscape.

Over 600 miles northeast of the Maine coast lies what in August officially became eastern Canada’s largest national park. The national park, called Akami-uapishku–KakKasuak in the native Innu language and Mealy Mountain in English, encompasses 2.6 million acres of rugged Labrador landscape full of forest, tundra, lakes, rivers, and even an amazing 50-mile stretch of sandy beach called the Wunderstraand.

One of the many special breeding birds of Mealy Mountain National Park is the stunningly beautiful harlequin duck. Although none have been tagged and tracked as far as we know, it’s likely that some of the harlequin ducks that will soon be arriving along the Maine coast were hatched in the rocky streams of Mealy Mountain National Park.

A little earlier in the summer, a long-awaited announcement came that over 2 million acres of the Broadback River watershed of northern Quebec would finally become protected. The Grand Council of the Cree and its communities had long advocated for the protection of these lands, and it was a welcome gesture when the Quebec government agreed. Many rivers have been dammed in Quebec for hydropower, with negative for fish, birds, and people, and more dams are planned for still-pristine rivers, so protections of this river and its surrounding woods and wetlands is a positive step for birds and the ecosystems on which they depend.

Species like the Wilson’s warblers and Cape May warblers that Maine birders have enjoyed seeing during migration here in Maine over the last few weeks, and the white-crowned and fox sparrows that will pass through in October — these are among the myriad bird species that breed in the Broadback River watershed. The Quebec government left out some of the lands — including some of the last large intact forest blocks — that the community of Waswanapi has asked to be protected. Hopefully, those will also soon receive protection as well.

The largest newly protected area that moved closer to finalization over the summer was the whopping 6.4 million-acre Thaidene Nene (pronounced Tha-Den-Nay Nen-Ay)  National Park in the southeastern part of the Northwest Territories. This park, like the other two, has also come about through the leadership and initiative of the native people who have been on the land here for thousands of years.

In this case, the community of Lutsel K’e has been working for years to develop the plan, including an agreement to co-manage the park with Parks Canada and to staff the park with rangers from the community. Among the birds that may come down from Thaidene Nene to the Maine coast: white-winged scoters, surf scoters, and red-necked grebes.

Let’s all give a collective “thank you” to the communities to our north that are ensuring that Maine, and the world, will continue to see and enjoy these birds!

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of the Birder’s Conservation Handbook. His grandfather, the late John Chase, was a columnist for the Boothbay Register for many years. Allison Childs Wells, formerly of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, is a senior director at the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a nonprofit membership organization. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds.”