Like many people, we have been spending April vacation in Florida for a number of years. We treasure our time with family and take advantage of the warm weather for daily tennis matches and splashing in the pool.

But we also love seeing the multitudes of birds, often in surprising places.

It is so much fun to watch families of the Florida sandhill crane in cattle pastures and even sometimes in and near ball fields and in residential areas. Or how about a flock of white ibis searching through the grass of a suburban backyard? A group of peeping black-bellied whistling ducks passing overhead on rapidly beating wings? A brown and white-streaked limpkin probing its downcurved bill into a snail shell on the shore of a lake in a city park?

Among these birds that are so exotic for us Mainers, it’s also heartening to see lots of familiar “faces.” Many of the species that breed or migrate through Maine spend the winter in the southeastern U.S. including throughout Florida.

This week we have again escaped the lingering cold, snow, freezing rain, and snow of Maine’s April vacation for the warm sunshine of Florida. While we have been here, the first palm warblers have started to trickle back into Maine. But there are also of palm warblers here in Florida. These perky, tail-wagging birds nest in peat bogs from Maine across Canada to Alaska. In Florida, you are likely to find them just about anywhere, especially once you recognize their distinctive flat “check” call note. This year we have seen them wagging their tails in the backyard, beside the tennis court, and even on the grounds of a popular Orlando water park. Tiny ruby-crowned kinglets love to spend the winter flicking their wings and hiding out within the brushy understory of bottomland forest and in the jungle of branches of Spanish moss-draped live oaks and other trees in Florida and other Gulf Coast states.

Flocks of cedar waxwings are still hanging around here on their wintering grounds in Florida, their high-pitched “seee” sounds emanating from the tops of those same Spanish moss-draped live oaks. We have seen gray catbirds and heard their whiny, complaining calls in a number of places this week as well. The first catbirds will likely appear in Maine in early May. American goldfinches don’t nest in Florida but are common winterers here and are now forming into loud, boisterous groups that chatter from tree tops as they prepare to head north.

Hermit thrushes are showing up this week in Maine but are common wintering birds in the southeastern U.S. including here in the Sunshine State. Yellow-bellied sapsuckers and yellow-rumped warblers join them on the wintering grounds and will be arriving in Maine this month.

We’ll be back in a few days, too, having had the opportunity to see these birds on their Florida wintering grounds and their Maine breeding grounds in the same month!

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 working statewide to protect the nature of Maine. Both are widely published natural history writers and are the authors of the book, “Maine’s Favorite Birds” and the just-released “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao.”