We had a sprightly little northern parula warbler hopping around in our crabapple tree a few days ago, it’s sky-blue head and wings creating a subtle contrast among the red-brown leaves. Several days later we spied a black-throated green warbler showing off its yellow cheeks high up in a birch tree in Winthrop. Due to work-related travel schedules, we haven’t had much time to look seriously for migrating warblers. Nonetheless they have found us. Other folks are seeing lots of warblers across the state—a bounty before the warbler well goes dry in a couple of weeks as the little birds head south for the winter. Certain late-migrating species like yellow-rumped and palm warblers will still be found in numbers through much of October. And increasingly, as Maine experiences milder late-fall and early-winter temperatures, there have been more warblers staying later and later, breaking previous records for “last of the season.”

Even as we continue to see warblers here in Maine, birders from across the migratory routes are also reporting them. In New York City’s Central Park, in the heart of Manhattan, there seems to be a horde of avian enthusiasts. Daily they share stunning photos and video of the migrant warblers, vireos, and other birds that stop off in that green oasis surrounded by concrete canyons and skyscrapers. Some birds are not lucky enough to find Central Park when making their way through that urban landscape, as we saw when someone shared video of a poor Virginia rail skulking along the sidewalk of a car-lined street. Rails are adept at staying hidden when among the cattails of a marsh, which is their normal and preferred habitat. Inconspicuous, this one was not!

Our friends from the islands of Aruba and Curaçao, off the coast of Venezuela, are seeing many migrants that are nearing the completion of their fall journey to the wintering grounds. They are spotting blackpoll warblers, black-and-white warblers, American redstarts, and good numbers of northern waterthrushes in the mangroves and buttonbush trees that line the shores of wetlands and coasts there. A friend from Aruba shared a photo of a flock of 50 or more blue-winged teal—one of “our” ducks that winters the farthest south here in the Americas—that had apparently just arrived there in the last week.

Here in Maine, many of the shorebirds that are still around are young birds that hatched this past summer high up in Arctic Canada or the northern Boreal Forest region. The adults of most species passed through in August and early September. Our southern island friends are seeing those adult shorebirds now—species like black-bellied plovers, least and semipalmated sandpipers, greater and lesser yellowlegs, short-billed dowitchers, and others.

When you consider all of the places birds need for rest stops along the entirety of their continental or hemispheric migration routes, it’s no wonder many don’t make it. In fact, it’s more than a little amazing that any of them make it south in the fall and back north again each spring. Clearly, birds need lots and lots of safe habitat of all kinds to find food, water, and places to rest undisturbed to have any chance for survival.

In our area, organizations like the Boothbay Region Land Trust are among those working to ensure that those migrating birds passing through Maine have such critical stopover habitat. Now we just need additional resources to allow more land to be protected by this and other conservation organizations through programs like Land for Maine’s Future.

In the face of the recent news about massive bird declines that we wrote about here last week, we here in Maine need to step up to do our part to bring birds back. It’s never too soon to contact your elected official and urge him or her to help ensure Land for Maine’s Future funding. Another legislative session is just around the corner. Be a voice for the birds.

Jeffrey V. Wells, Ph.D., is a Fellow of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology and Vice President of Boreal Conservation for National Audubon. Dr. Wells is one of the nation's leading bird experts and conservation biologists and author of “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 “Birds of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao: A Site and Field Guide” from Cornell Press.